More coastline noir? Oh, we do like to brood beside the seaside
On BBC1 tonight, widowed detective Jimmy Perez will be wrestling with his grief as he gazes out to the foaming Atlantic ocean, in Shetland.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the country and on the other channel, tormented police inspector Matthew Venn will be swimming furiously in the Devon seas.
Venn has been doing this nightly since Monday, in the four-part drama The Long Call (ITV), to cleanse his mind before resuming his murder investigations. For Perez, it’s the first appearance of the week.
Both men are the creation of crime writer Ann Cleeves, who loves to set her dark stories against a backdrop of stormy currents and turbulent waves. She has invented a new genre: coastline noir.
An erudite and nuanced reviewer could probe this metaphor, revealing how the seascape imagery reflects the deadly deeps of the human soul.
Because I’m as shallow as a rock pool at low tide, my interest is chiefly in the panoramic views on display in The Long Call — especially from the millionaire’s clifftop pad that is home to creepy Chris (neil Morrissey). His living room, the size of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, is entirely surrounded by windows. It’s got more glass than the Eden Project. I worry about how long it must take him to pull the curtains of an evening.
DI Matthew and his husband Jonathan (Ben Aldridge and Declan Bennett) don’t have that problem, because they leave the curtains wide open at night and wake to rooms flooded in light. They spend so much time wandering about without their shirts on and snogging that I’m starting to wonder if they are simply exhibitionists.
Matthew’s mother called round one morning with some evidence that could be useful in a kidnapping case and got quite an eyeful of Jonathan when her son opened the door. She’ll be round every day before breakfast after that.
Juliet Stevenson, as explosively repressed mum Dorothy, is one of the stars who are making The Long Call addictive and unmissable. The murder storyline is humdrum, but the characters are engrossing.
She seemed touchingly vulnerable as she showed Matthew the scrapbook she kept charting his police career. Then she told him that when he rejected her Evangelical church and came out as gay he ‘took any joy I had left and dried it up’.
‘Your poor dad,’ she added in a murmur, as her son reeled.
‘Poor dad’ was the running joke as the Bafta-winning sitcom Stath Lets Flats (C4) returned, with Jamie Demetriou as the inept father-to-be. Stath was trying to be thrilled but overwhelmed by terror, as his current girlfriend Katia (Ellie White) helped deliver the baby for his ex Carole (Katy Wix). ‘How should I feel? I don’t know!’ he bleated.
This is one-note comedy — hilarious if you enjoy the sight of implausibly stupid people embarrassing themselves endlessly.
I just find it wearing. The gag is funny at first, as Stath splutters over a stranger’s toddler: ‘They’re so young at that age!’ But the humour wears off quickly, not least because everyone in the show is equally hapless.
Stath’s dad sat all his employees down to explain that a few bad business decisions meant no one was getting paid.
For a few minutes, it seemed Stath and his sister Sophie (reallife sister natasia Demetriou) would have to take over, though neither wanted to — like an inverted version of the magnificent comedy drama Succession.
That idea went nowhere and soon Stath was back to worrying about his newborn baby: ‘What is it? Is it a woman? Is it health and safety?’