Simm-ply a case of getting it over with promptly

COLLATERAL

Monday, BBC Two

TRAUMA

Monday to Wednesday, STV

It’s typical. You wait ages for one homicide-themed drama starring John Simm, then two come along at once. Now that we’ve got that unavoidable zinger out of the way, let’s turn to the four hours of Simm we were treated to last week.

Fans of this always watchable actor were spoiled for choice on Monday when he cropped up in both Collateral and Trauma, written respectively by veteran playwright David Hare and Mike Bartlett of Doctor Foster renown.

Simm isn’t the main star of Collateral, he’s part of an impressive ensemble including Carey Mulligan, Billie Piper and Nicola Walker.

Mulligan plays the wry detective in charge of an investigation into the mysterious murder of a pizza delivery

man. Piper was the last person to see him alive before he was shot on her doorstep. She’s also the ex-wife of a Labour MP (Simm). Walker, meanwhile, plays a gay vicar whose troubled migrant partner saw the murder take place.

The key question of course is: why would someone randomly assassinate a pizza delivery man? Well, they wouldn’t would they? The crime was premediated and carried out by a slick professional military officer.

But why? The murdered man was an innocent Syrian refugee. The obvious conclusion is that he wasn’t the intended victim.

Driven by Hare’s thoughts on illegal immigration and the way we treat vulnerable asylum seekers, Collateral is a sombre state-of-the-nation address disguised as a thriller.

Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess, but episode one established the requisite amount of intrigue. Its slowburning momentum and overt political subtext are rather effective bedfellows.

Given Hare’s reputation and the calibre of his cast, one suspects – or rather hopes – that Collateral will deliver on its early promise.

Mind you, actors, no matter how talented, can’t always be trusted when it comes to choosing material. God only knows why John Simm and Adrian Lester hitched their collective star power to Trauma, a melodramatic maelstrom of utter tosh which never convinced for a moment.

Simm played the father of a teenage boy who was stabbed and killed for no discernible reason. Lester played the surgeon who couldn’t save the boy’s life.

Simm somehow managed to barge into the operating theatre at the moment of his son’s death, and immediately blamed Dr Lester for failing to do everything he could.

Simm became obsessed with proving that Lester wasn’t fit for purpose. His stalking campaign even stretched to finding work in the hospital’s coffee shop. That was the point where I gave up on the possibility of Trauma being based in any kind of plausible reality. It was laughable.

Simm did his best, but his relentlessly angry, unbalanced character came across as a strident mouthpiece rather than a three-dimensional human being. His vendetta never rang true. I had similar misgivings about the equally contrived and unlikely Doctor Foster, which suggests Bartlett isn’t a writer unduly troubled by notions of dramatic authenticity.

Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but expecting us to go along with a total abandonment of logic is quite another.

This was ostensibly a drama about the unimaginable trauma of losing a child, but the sensitive subject matter was fatally cheapened by Bartlett’s lack of subtlety.

ITV would no doubt argue that stripping Trauma over three consecutive nights was an attempt to create socalled event television, but I suspect it was more a case of getting it out of the way as swiftly and painlessly as possible.