A rollicking ride with two excellent leads
‘Look who it is,” sneered a villain. “Sherlock f---ing Holmes as I live and breathe.” Except it wasn’t. It was a London detective with a scruffier signature coat, a less arrogant manner and a limp.
The latest adaptation of JK Rowling’s detective stories, Strike:
Career of Evil (BBC One, Sunday), saw charismatically dishevelled Tom Burke return for his third case as amputee private eye Cormoran Strike. It meant TV had caught up with the books, published under Rowling’s pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. It’s now a waiting game for her to finish the next novel. Three Strikes and you’re out? Surely not.
The two-part mystery opened in gruesomely grabbing style with a courier delivering a severed leg to Strike’s office. He’s lucky it wasn’t “left in a safe place” to get stolen or soaked by rain. Strike soon narrowed down the potential limb-sender to three prime suspects with personal vendettas against him.
This lovable trio comprised a paedophile who Strike once roughed up, a wife-beater he put in prison and a seedy rocker suspected of killing Strike’s mother Leda. In a treat for
Peep Show fans, the rocker was played by Matt King, whose character in that pioneering sitcom, Super Hans, was no stranger to music himself, having been in brilliantly named bands The Hair Blair Bunch, Man Feelings and Curse These Metal Hands.
To whittle down the list with some old-fashioned sleuthing, Strike and sidekick Robin (Holliday Grainger) hopped in her rickety Land Rover for a road trip to two less telegenic parts of the country – Barrow-infurness and Corby.
Back in the capital, a schoolgirl was found dead and legless, with Strike framed for her murder. Meanwhile, he and Robin’s flirtatious friendship was making her tedious fiancé Matthew (Kerr Logan) jealous, which backfired on him pleasingly.
The characters, and the tender relationship between them, acquired new depth with flashbacks to Strike’s military days and Robin’s confession of her own past trauma. Their dialogue was witty. Grainger shone and Burke inhabited his role with stubbly charm. You could almost smell the fags, beer and angst on him.
In the past, all that’s prevented
Strike from being a flawless series were each case’s prosaic endings and the fact that Strike’s foes weren’t quite worthy. Let’s hope it makes that leap this time because it remains a rollicking ride in the company of two excellent leads. Now hurry up and write some more please, Ms Rowling.
For the first time in years, Top
Gear (BBC Two, Sunday) has roared back onto the schedules largely free of controversy. Slappy chappy Jeremy Clarkson is lucratively embedded at Amazon’s The Grand
Tour, while Chris Evans’s disastrously shouty season at the helm of the BBC cash-cow is a fading memory. It’s as if
TG has reverted to being a reasonably entertaining programme about expensive cars.
The big innovation as the latest six-part season got under way was presenter Matt Leblanc’s transition from Hollywood luminary into bantering every-bloke. The discomfort he visibly radiated during his disastrous double-act with Evans in 2016 had evaporated. With a hint of dad-bod spread and a willingness to be the punchline of his travelling companions’s jokes, it was an impressive transformation by the 50-year-old who, during the glory days of Friends, was among the highestpaid stars on television.
On a road trip to Utah, Leblanc was joined by the cheerful Rory Reid and a studiously grumpy Chris Harris. Across the gorgeously shot landscape the trio zoomed, in a banana-hued Hennessey Mustang GT350 R (Leblanc), Jaguar F-type SVR (Reid) and Mclaren 570 GT (Harris). After the upheavals following Clarkson’s producer-punching 2015 exit, it was exactly the formulaic derring-do fans will have wanted.
Back at the studio, Leblanc’s non-existent interviewing skills have been a stumbling point. But, having apparently undergone a crash-course in the torturous act of interacting with normal people, he displayed only flashes of the earlier stiffness chatting to guest Rob Brydon.
The new Top Gear will never be the same as the old Top Gear. The chemistry between the replacement presenters lacks the self-awareness and borderline melancholia of the previous regime. But they rubbed along well enough and are to be commended for apparently rescuing a franchise which, during Chris Evans’s car-crash tenure, was set for the scrap-heap. Ed Power
Strike: Career of Evil ★★★★ Top Gear ★★★★