Tough northern cop who can’t do the dishes? It won’t wash!
Odd, HOW the mind decides what it can and can’t believe. I’ve no trouble accepting Sarah Parish as a tough Northern detective, even though she is also the evil Queen of adventure series Atlantis and the scary Beeb lady from W1A.
Partly that’s because she’s a superb actress — good enough to make me disconnect all rational sense and agree that, in the thriller Bancroft (ITV), as a young police constable, she investigated a murder that she’d committed herself ... and got the case shut down. Now that is tough.
My disbelief did wobble when a local gangster hurled a Molotov cocktail through her sitting room window. The house is so swish it boasts a kitchen that glows white, like a heavenly vision. But the petrol bomb left a jagged, cartoon-like hole in her cheap windowpane.
Surely such a gorgeous home would have toughened doubleglazing, with glass that bottles and bricks simply bounce off?
But then I remembered Parish, as dCI Elizabeth Bancroft, is tough and Northern. Even in this week’s snowstorms, she’d never wear a coat. And she wouldn’t have double-glazing.
disbelief still fully suspended, I conceded that dCI Bancroft might go round to her old boss’s house and batter him to death with a rock, because he had started wondering out loud about that murder case, 27 years earlier.Better to silence his suspicions ... even though he’d just told her he was terminally ill anyhow.
In these circumstances, it seems entirely feasible that Bancroft’s ambitious rival, played by Ade Edmondson, should guess that she is covering up a frenzied knife murder, and despatch a young detective to investigate. It all makes perfect sense.
But something was niggling, something just didn’t feel real. I watched again — and there it was!
In that splendid kitchen, one that is bound to have a dishwasher, Bancroft opts to do the washing up herself, after a pizza with her son. So she holds the plates under a running tap and dabs at them with a brush.
What sort of tough single Northern mum doesn’t know how to wash dishes? Surely her mother taught her to submerge the crockery in hot, sudsy water! Scrubbing it under a tap will just spray flecks of pizza all over that lovely kitchen.
Suddenly I could no longer believe in this bomb-dodging, fire-fighting, knife-wielding, skull-crushing copper. It all felt just a tad . . . far-fetched.
ITV has given us too many of these overblown police dramas in the past couple of years. Philip Glenister in Prey, Anna Friel in Marcella, Helen McCrory in Fearless . . . all would have been much better with the plots dialled down a few notches.
It’s easy to believe the ‘family and friends’ Nigella Lawson entertains every week really are her closest chums — though their faces are constantly changing, and none of them says anything audible. We just hear them laugh, charmingly, and see Nigella blush at their praises.
Nigella: At My Table (BBC2) took us to her country retreat, a farmhouse wreathed in mists, with a kitchen apparently moulded from a piece of burnished copper.
despite an impending dinner party, Nigella had time to walk her labradoodle through the woods, before showing us how to make devilled eggs and a hotpot that sizzled with ‘all the flavours of medieval Christmas feasting’.
It looked deliciously festive. But one thing was odd: the farm was bedecked with thousands of lights, yet no one was there to greet Nigella when she arrived.
Who put up the decorations? Was it the dog?