Clunes’s genius cop stalks the stalker...
THE SECRET to great policing has been revealed. It involves the humble tea towel. In the superb Manhunt: The Night Stalker (ITV, Monday to Thursday). Martin Clunes’s DCI Colin Sutton and his wife Louise (Claudie Blakley) are doing the dishes (oddly no sign of a dishwasher).
She washes; he dries.within moments, Louise has come up with the name Minstead Lite as a different way of classifying burglaries by Night Stalker suspects. It’s a genius idea.and, yes, behind every great man... also applies. So the best way to come up with an idea is to simply shuffle around your own kitchen.
We’ve seen a lot of true crime dramas lately. But I believe Night Stalker is the best drama that Martin Clunes has done. And I’m also including every episode of Doc Martin (ITV) because we do occasionally get a dramatic dash to hospital down a treacherous single-track lane in Cornwall.
Clunes is often thought of as a comedy actor who dabbles in serious drama.these two series of Manhunt though have proved his ability to inhabit a real character who is without obvious traits and to make him absolutely believable. Indeed, he looks nothing like a hero policeman.
The real DCI Colin Sutton must be beyond pleased. By the end of episode two, I was so invested in the character I was willing him on to make an arrest. Get him! Who wasn’t rooting for this detective who, let’s face it, has a brilliant eye for detail?
But there’s also a clever script here that lets the actors do the work. In one moving scene between Sutton and an elderly Polish man, another victim, both barely spoke as they relayed to each other the horror of the Night Stalker’s attack.
The drama again showed Sutton’s ability to work within an established team, and deal with the needle that comes with this. Not easy, especially when the existing boss is having briefings in his own house to “save his back”! He’d narrowed down the suspect to a “black, motorcycling,tv satellite installer”.
And what did they talk about when Sutton finally confronted Delroy Grant, the notorious rapist? Rather improbably, cricket. “What do you think about England’s prospects in South Africa,” wondered the prisoner. Sutton thought they were surprisingly good. Ever the canny detective as moments later, a now relaxed Grant revealed he’d “always worn gloves” to a policewoman.
Batfa for Mr Clunes – and a knighthood for Sutton, please.
The tone was somewhat frothier in Endeavour (ITV, Sunday) as they investigated a naturist resort.as you can imagine, it was done with the utmost decorum and decency.well, it was 1971. Thursday and Endeavour even
interviewed a window cleaner.thankfully, they didn’t extract his confessions, or that would have been ridiculous.as it was, the naturists revealed nothing more than a few flimsy alibis.
Writer Russell Lewis penned one of his wittiest scripts as he sent Thursday off to a sex shop in Soho, to visit the “dirty squad”.again, a subject handled with great delicacy.we also learned some more scraps from Endeavour’s past when his stepmother turned up in Oxford.where’d she spring from?
They didn’t get on but she did reveal Morse was the son of a “private hire driver” – what shame! – who had once transported the Aga Khan.well, well.
Didn’t the young Morse do well? The final episode tonight is called Terminus. Let’s hope it’s all centred on Oxford bus conductors – and nothing more diabolical.
An increasing sign that things are improving in the world was the triumphant return of The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4, Tuesday). It’s always reassuring to have something back on the screens exactly as you recalled it. To change the Bake Off would be like having a vegan Victoria Sandwich. Hang on...yes, we do now have a vegan baker, Freya, who was actually very good though I will leave the tasting to Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood.
Speaking of whom, we have a “new Prue”. She’s contestant Maggie, who Paul mistakenly called Prue when he first met her. Former midwife Maggie is a super smiley woman of a certain age. Indeed, she’s more jolly hockey sticks than Clare Balding at a nail-biting equestrian event. Elsewhere we had a dazzling range of contestants but of wildly varying abilities. Indeed, some were rubbish which, by my reckoning, is far more entertaining than a baker who knows what they’re doing. Hollywood even asked contestant Chigs, “Do you enjoy baking…?” Well, he had only been doing it for a year. How long do you need?
Congratulations too on the return of my favourite showstopper – “defying gravity”. Someone has a wicked sense of humour.