Saturday night TV takes a walk on the dark side

Taboo BBC One, Saturday

Sherlock – The Lying Detective BBC One, Sunday

t a time when television drama seems to be dominated by literary adaptations and cop shows, offered something different. It told the tale of James Delaney (Tom Hardy), a buccaneer from the early 19th century who’d travelled to Africa as a cadet with the East India Company – and then gone native. The opening scenes saw him returning to Georgian London a decade later, burying a bag of diamonds and heading directly to his father’s funeral. Within minutes it was apparent that Delaney was not a man to be trifled with. He crash-landed on the Capital like a one-man dirty bomb: when the East India Company wanted to buy the small island his father had left him off the American West Coast, Delaney told them to go hang. Not only that, but he demanded the immediate resumption of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister (Oona Chaplin).

The history of the last couple of decades of television drama is, in part, the history of some really messed up men – Tony Soprano, Walter White, Kurt Wallander – and to that pantheon of flawed heroes you can now add James Delaney. Taboo was created by Hardy and his father and the Delaney character could not have been played by anyone else, with the possible exception of a silverback gorilla.

I’m hardly the first to notice, but if you’re

Ain the market for simmering violence, brute physicality and low-level frenzy then Hardy is your man. Here, he was such a menacing presence that you felt he might punch the cameraman at any moment for having the temerity to keep shoving a lens in his face. As the title suggested, Taboo was not especially family-friendly. It’s vision of London was basically a walk-in abattoir, in which people with terrible teeth spent their days plucking chickens. It was superbly realised, if unremittingly grim. What’s more, Hardy’s Delaney, it was clear, had dabbled with the dead in his time in Africa which lead to one or two weirdy voodoo sequences in which the screen went giddy and he spoke in tongues. If you were expecting Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway you might have been surprised. Full of hazardous material though it may have been, in the main Taboo succeeded, and even when it didn’t it should be congratulated for trying. With Hardy as its lodestone it barrelled along irresistibly, fizzing with ideas and images and not giving a damn what anyone thought.

Sonce fizzed with ideas, too. When it first arrived in 2010 with its on-screen text messages and stylised technical pizzazz, not to mention its format of just three feature-length films per series, it gave Conan Doyle’s shop-soiled stories a steam clean. That, I suspect, was why last week’s new series opener went down so badly – having Sherlock quickly solving an irrelevant case and then morphing into a Bond-style tough guy felt like a giveaway that the writers were running on empty.

Blessedly, they weren’t. The second episode of the fourth series, The Lying Detective, was a belting return to form helped, as always with Sherlock Holmes, by him having to contend with a worthy adversary. As the unutterably vile Culverton Smith, a mega-rich, high-profile philanthropist, Toby Jones walked off with every scene in which he appeared. Smith, of course, was actually a serial killer “hiding in plain sight” – and the allusions to Jimmy Savile, another monster whose money, power and fame rendered him untouchable, were tart and plentiful.

This episode was most of all a bravura performance from writer Steven Moffat, who managed to keep several plates spinning – nailing Culverton Smith, John Watson’s grief for his wife, Holmes’s drug addiction, and a cracking last-minute revelation that there was a third Holmes sibling, a sister. At times, the plotting of Sherlock becomes irritating for being too clever by half. Here, underpinned by some of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s best work in a long time, we were reminded that the real story that sustains Sherlock is the relationship between two friends.

Only Tom Hardy, or a silverback gorilla, could play this part with such menace

If you draw parallels between TV and football, then shows such as Sherlock or Taboo would be high-paced encounters, short passing, one or two tricks, not everything coming off, but you’d still pay to watch. In contrast,

a biopic of Bobby Moore and his wife, resorted to long-ball tactics: route one, lump it forward, hope it gets somewhere close to the big man.

This was a leaden picture that managed to make a national hero look dull, possibly even a little thick. The decision to consider