Brenda Blethyn remains the reason to watch Vera
Once a detective series gets its feet under the table, it’s quite hard to dislodge. Everyone’s looking for the next Morse or Midsomer Murders, which is why series can hang around for years without ever quite capturing that elusive something. It’s difficult to imagine anyone nominating (ITV, Sunday) as their favourite ever crime show, but here it is, back for a seventh series with Brenda Blethyn still wearing that old mac and rainhat as DCI Vera Stanhope.
Based on the novels of Ann Cleeves, it is, of course, a necessary part of the landscape, being a double rarity: its sleuth is a woman, and not a boringly young looker either; and it’s set in the North East, to whose beautiful landscape TV drama is an all too infrequent visitor.
Two birds, one stone then. But may one gently suggest that Vera is, at best, middling. This opener, the first of four two-hour films, was called Natural Selection for reasons not made clear by a plot in which a young woman was found washed up on an island bird sanctuary – the so-called “Galapagos of the North” making a craggy cameo.
There were plenty of potential culprits whose motives were ticked off with dogged thoroughness. A drug operation was unearthed, as was a lot of guilt about a covered-up accident, before the truth limped into the light. The father attempting to take the rap for the daughter was exactly the same denouement as last year’s riveting French drama The Disappearance.
The problem with Vera is that absolutely everyone seems like an actor putting another entry on their CV. No one, either under suspicion or in the incident room, looks or sounds like a Geordie, or even like a vaguely fleshed-out character. They’re all grids on a plot map. Even the pathologist, usually a wag with a mordant sense of humour in these things, is a charisma vacuum.
The only reason to watch Vera is Blethyn, who wears the character like that old coat: a collection of mumsy tics and sceptical squeaks. She’s a consummate pro, but she could probably get away with phoning it in. Vera’s sidekick (played by Kenny Doughty) has a baby at home who won’t sleep. The little bairn could do worse than tune in to this series.
In an alternative world, there would be a follow-up series for SS-GB (BBC One, Sunday). In the style of a moreish American multi-parter, it concluded with way more questions than answers. You needed to be a four-headed hydra to keep an eye on a plot which swivelled this way and that as factions within both the resistance and the occupiers entered the deadly endgame.
By the close, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer (Sam Riley) stumbled across moorland, in possession of vital atomic secrets and a map. Barbara Barga (Kate Bosworth), not knowing if Archer was dead or alive, vamoosed before she could be flown home. And old Harry (James Cosmo) was recovering in a barn from a bullet to his lower portions.
Alas, Len Deighton didn’t write a sequel to his 1978 what-if thriller, and we are where we are, with the Nazis still in command of the UK but contemplating their eventual untergang in the shape of a weaponised, bellicose America. For all the bows left untied, this felt like a plausible outro which withheld the glib offer of catharsis. No film noir with any self-respect does happy ever afters.
Riley rose to the role of reluctant action hero communicating in nods and whispers. At one point, he even consented to raise his voice to bawl out a well-fed collaborator. But the bigger journey – and the real star turn – belonged to Lars Eidinger’s SS doctor Huth, who faced the firing squad almost heroically. He dismissed his deadly rival Kellermann (Rainer Bock), finally revealed to be far the greater sadist, as “a giant turd”. A sentiment we can all get behind, I’m sure.
The script by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade slotted together the plot’s intricate jigsaw with a little too much reliance on reported events taking place somewhere off screen. We could have seen more of Jason Flemyng’s shady string-puller Mayhew. Perhaps the whole thing needed another hour.
What underpinned SS-GB was the lashings of atmosphere. Trilbies aloft for composer Dan Jones and production designer Lisa Marie Hall, who imagined England under occupation with commitment to marrow-chilling realism.
Vera ★★ SS-GB ★★★★