Is Cassie Stuart TV’S best detective?
The surest sign a drama series is firing on all cylinders is when the pace doesn’t drop off in the middle episodes but rushes on with a keen sense that a jaw-dropping finale is fast approaching. So it was with the fourth episode of Chris Lang’s addictive six-parter Unforgotten
(ITV, Sunday), which toyed fiendishly with our suspicions and emotions before finishing on a note so unexpected and horrifying that it seemed certain to reverberate through to the end of the series.
The hour opened with a big break for DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and her cold case team. A DNA match tied one of the suspects, dodgy salesman Pete Carr (Neil Morrissey), to a burglary on the night of the murder. And if further proof were needed that all four prime suspects conspired to lie to the police, another angry divorcee – sinister Dr Finch’s (Alex Jennings) spectacularly traumatised ex-wife Derren (Siobhan Redmond) – was on hand to contradict their version of events again.
At times it seemed barely credible that quite so many staggering new leads (another girl was dressed as Madonna?) could come out of the woodwork 18 years on, but with characters as well drawn as these it hardly mattered. True to form, home lives threw spanners into the professional works. DCI Stuart’s moodily pre-dementia father, Martin (Peter Egan), hurled a corker this week, upsetting her so much she accidentally left a key case file in a coffee shop.
It was a shocking, careerthreatening error, especially when the file found its way into the hands of the rabble-rousing, law-flouting blogger who’s been inciting rumour and anger around the case for some time, causing further trouble for DCI Stuart.
That was as nothing, though, to the gasps induced, despite the foreboding build-up, by the shocking vigilante stabbing of Carr in the closing scenes. A man who though guilty of being a thief, a coward and a fraudster was not, it now seems, a murderer. Just very much a victim of our fake-news times.
Of course, we can’t be sure that’s it for him yet. Either way, the attack will impact massively on Stuart and her investigation. And, from the audience’s point of view, the scene did what all great drama series do, leaving us open-mouthed long after the titles rolled. Wishing the week away to see happens next.
There were many moments in Angela Carter: Of Wolves and Women (BBC Two, Saturday) that lingered in the mind, too. Almost all provided by Carter herself, speaking in tones no less waspish for being delivered three or more decades ago.
“Okay, so I write overblown, purple self-indulgent, prose. So f---ing what?” was a particularly fine rebuke to critics. Although a line that summed up her work rather better was: “I think all art is political. I think you can’t walk down the street without being political.”
No one with even a passing acquaintance with Carter’s macabre, fantastical writing could think it less than brilliant. Words leap off the page, pummelling eyes, ears and brain with vivacity and wit, alive with deeper meaning. Even so, few would go so far in their claims for it as super-fan author Jeanette Winterson in her opening remark: “Any woman writing now has been influenced by Angela Carter – whether they’ve read her or not.”
It’s a tribute to this documentary that the claim seemed less eyebrowraising by the close. Carter’s life followed a trajectory that might have been designed for literary mythologising. The suffocating mother, the oppressively depressive first husband, the radicalising trip to Japan, the sneering of (some) critics, the refusal to compromise, the awe in which she was held by students and literary contemporaries, the tragic early death from lung cancer in 1992.
Despite the praise heaped by contemporaries like Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, Carter emerged here as a fiercely fragile, subversively political talent. The main thrust of the film was how ahead of her time she was, and that perhaps her time has come, finally, now. Maybe so in terms of gaining a wider readership, but on the evidence presented here Carter seemed absolutely a creature of her time. A writer whose chief aim, and pleasure, was to kick against social and sexual constraint, and the establishment, no matter what form it took. And who probably would have been scathing about the degree of unalloyed adoration on display here.
Unforgotten
Angela Carter: Of Wolves and Women