With the mystery solved, has Baptiste peaked too soon?
The plot didn’t so much thicken in episode two of Baptiste (BBC One, Sunday) as turn limp and soggy. The first hour of this spin-off featuring the enigmatic detective from The Missing laid an intriguing trail of clues through Amsterdam; the second part lurched into lurid revenge thriller.
This did give co-star Tom Hollander plenty to do portraying a creepy criminal masquerading as a businessman (the giveaway was the severed head in his basement). However, it did not particularly suit Tchéky Karyo as septuagenarian sleuth Julien Baptiste. His is a character who steps softly through the world, but as the series shifted up the gears into a something a bit gaudy and Hollywood, he was required to frantically run around Amsterdam. His gentle whodunnit was turning into an action movie around him.
Last week, the eponymous detective tracked down missing sex worker Natalie Rose (Anna Próchniak) to her houseboat. There was a nasty shock as Rose revealed that her doting uncle Edward Stratton (Hollander) was, in reality, a jealous and violent client.
That should have been Baptiste’s cue to break off contact. Instead he met Stratton at a café to tell him that he needed to let go of Rose. This brought out the mewling monster in Stratton – and a hint of over-acting from Hollander. He swiped Baptiste’s car-keys and used his Sat Nav to trace the prostitute to her hideout. When one of Stratton’s Romanian gangster pals paid a surprise visit, Natalie, hiding in the waters beneath the boat, snagged her leg and drowned.
Baptiste and Stratton were horrified: the detective for having led a dangerous man to an innocent woman, Stratton because the object of his obsession had slipped fatally free.
Yet after committing so heavily to setting the pieces on the board, with the death of Rose, it felt as though
Baptiste had short-circuited itself. Our detective was left determined to bring Stratton to justice. Stratton, meanwhile, having earlier confronted transgender former gangland figure Kim Vogel (Talisa Garcia), huffed about Amsterdam looking angry.
There was also the knotty matter of the tulip farmer who discovered a stash of euros in his field and is somehow connected to the dead Rose (he later turned up at the hospital where her ex-boyfriend’s son awaited an operation). And Baptiste was confronted by intergenerational rivalry in the form of the whippersnapper police detective son of an old flame (who had gender issues of his own). Lots bubbling in the pot then. But with the mystery of Rose’s disappearance so quickly resolved it was hard to avoid the suspicion that Baptiste has gone prematurely off the boil.
When Matt Leblanc announced he was leaving Top Gear (BBC Two, Sunday) at the end of the last series, he cited the extensive travel commitments as one of the reasons for his departure. Had the Friends star’s mind been made up, you wonder, during this week’s trip to Sri Lanka, where he and co-presenter Chris Harris mucked about on motorised rickshaws? The wheeze was that Harris was gung-ho for the adventure, while Leblanc played the grump. But he did seem genuinely fed up as he and Harris hefted sacks of tea leaves and had close encounters with passing traffic.
Leblanc’s plummeting enthusiasm notwithstanding, this was, in many ways, classic Top Gear. Harris climbed behind the wheel of a “super-saloon” Mercedes and zipped ahead of the Stig’s BMW. Rapper Professor Green, meanwhile, was an archetypal guest as he competed in the Star in a Reasonably Fast Car challenge and was chuffed to place ahead of fellow groove-purveyor Tinie Tempah.
One prominent omission was third-wheel host Rory Reid. He is to be demoted to companion series Extra Gear when Leblanc’s replacements Freddie Flintoff and Paddy Mcguinness join Harris next season. Yet it seems the downgrading is already under way as he was hardly in this episode at all, limited only to occasional studio banter.
Say what you like about Jeremy Clarkson, but he would never have stood by as one of his fellow petrolheads was relegated to glorified background furniture. The new TG, by contrast, has turned into a Leblanc / Harris two-hander with no room on the love-boat for the likeable Reid. Harris will just have to hope that he strikes up the equivalent buddy-movie chemistry with the new boys when they parachute in.