Red herrings don’t fool us in this contrived thriller
The thrill of a whodunit comes, of course, from scouring the screen for clues and trying to spot the red herrings. Different theories emerge as we are drip-fed information. But in order for this experience to be truly satisfying, those clues must be believable, must correlate with a wider narrative. They can’t simply be plonked in along the way, otherwise the credibility of the characters is eroded. In short, if the crumbs turn out to be inedible then what, really, is the point of following the path?
The first episode of Innocent (ITV), a four-part drama from Chris Lang and Matt Arlidge that continues nightly until Thursday, was a case in point. There were so many obviously placed, flashing “telltale signs”, it soon began to feel more like an exercise in second-guessing the writers, rather than anything like a serious drama.
This was a shame because there was much else to admire. The premise was uncomplicated but potent: a man called David Collins (Lee Ingleby) had been acquitted for the murder of his wife and released from prison. If he really is innocent – and there are still plenty of reasons to suspect that he might not be – then who did murder Tara Collins?
The central performances were exceptional, too. I was unsettled by Ingleby’s intense portrayal of David, a broken man whose grief and regret occasionally curdled into violence. It was hard to pinpoint what was so off-putting about him – that vacant stare, or the way that he dragged angrily on a cigarette – but he just gave off a slightly unpleasant aura. Best avoided at the pub, that sort of bloke.
And Hermione Norris was excellent as Alice, David’s on-edge sister-in-law, who, with her husband Rob (Adrian Rawlins), had brought up David and Tara’s two children in the years following the murder. Alice, though, became a prime suspect after it was revealed that she and Tara had had a row on the night of Tara’s murder.
But these performances were compelling in spite of – not because of – the script, which had the characters metamorphosing almost from scene to scene, all apparently as a device to spin the viewer this way and that.
David, for example, behaved in myriad different ways in this episode alone. First, he laid flowers at his wife’s grave and, with dewy eyes, hugged his brother Phil (Daniel Ryan); then we saw him banging out press-ups and threatening an old friend. Likewise, Alice’s behaviour pinballed from measured to neurotic and back again.
Rather than building psychological layers, this erratic approach gave the drama a fragmentary feel. No two scenes felt particularly connected, which struck me as a huge sacrifice to make for the sake of a few cheap tricks designed to throw us off the scent.
Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live (BBC Two) was one of the best pieces of television I have seen in years. This astonishing film followed seven patients, as they waited for, and in some cases underwent, a heart transplant at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle.
The access was remarkable. This was the first time that a full heart transplant had been shown on TV with unprecedented new technology. We were there in the meditative atmosphere of the theatre, as a patient was anaesthetised and surgeons got to work. The footage was graphic but it wasn’t presented in a sensationalist way. At each stage we were shown diagrams to explain what was going on, though there was nothing neat about this: scar tissue had to be cut, bones cracked, and bleeds stemmed.
Not every patient survived and the camera never shrank away from this. “I’ve planned my own funeral,” said 34-year-old Claire, who was born with half a heart. “You’ve just got to be practical.” Claire died a week later.
One of the key problems faced by surgeons is a shortage of donated hearts. On average, we were told, patients have to wait 1,200 days before a match can be found. The bald truth is that in order for someone to have a heart transplant, someone else needs to die. It was devastating to see people such as 56-year-old Joe waiting for the one thing needed to prolong his life. “I’ve got two kids who hopefully will have children of their own,” he said.
We tend to think of the heart as somehow integral to our personality. But what this showed is that it’s nothing more than an organ. To see nine-year-old Max careering round in the rain weeks after a successful heart transplant served as a call to arms for more of us to opt in for donation – it is a chance, in death, to give life.
Innocent ★★★ Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live ★★★★★