This juicy whodunit will have you hooked all week
In the domestic thriller (ITV), busybody Mary (Imelda Staunton) covets the life of Vivien, the woman next door. And who can blame her? Vivien has a carefree lifestyle, a brood of grown-up children who drop in every Sunday for lunch, and a new boyfriend whose idea of an understated date is to fly her to Le Touquet. On top of that, Vivien is played with trademark elegance by Francesca Annis, who looks better at 74 than most of us did at 44.
The new boyfriend is the problem here. Retired surgeon – or so he says – Mark (Stephen Rea) has swept Vivien off her feet, 18 months after the death of her husband. Her children are irked, and then suspicious. Is he after her money? As viewers, we are also given cause to doubt him: when Vivien has an unexplained collapse and needs to recuperate at home, is he doing the conscientious thing by moving in to keep an eye on her and doling out tranquilisers, or is there a more nefarious motive? Rea is a good piece of casting, an actor for whom the word “shifty” could have been invented.
We know things are going to go wrong because the drama kicked off with a crime scene, and the story is told in flashback. The identity of the victim and the details of the crime are yet to be revealed. And Mark is not the only potentially dodgy character here; Mary is clearly an unreliable narrator. It is a masterclass from Staunton, who elevates an already cracking script from Sarah Williams (The Long Song). She makes Mary smile just a little bit too much, talk just a little bit too earnestly, try just a little bit too hard.
Everyone here looks to have their life together but is secretly falling apart, including Vivien’s children: Helen (Claudie Blakley) is a high-flying NHS manager with a drink problem; Natalie (Lydia Leonard) is having an affair with her boss and by the end of the episode has told him that she’s pregnant, although I suspect she isn’t; and Jake (Russell Tovey) is being paid for sex by one of his personal training clients, after his wife threw him out over his gambling addiction. But you wouldn’t know any of that from their jokey family get-togethers.
It is great fun. The basic plot is not dissimilar to last year’s Gold Digger, and it inspires a close level of property envy – the sea as viewed from Vivien’s Sussex balcony is Caribbean blue – but Flesh and Blood doesn’t take itself half as seriously. The drama is being shown over four consecutive nights, which can feel like overkill in the case of some ITV dramas, but is just right for one that promises to be addictive.
As an ordinary viewer, you may find yourself picking holes in detective dramas. Imagine how galling it must be for a real detective. “I watch some of these cop dramas where you’ve got a senior investigating officer and his sidekick who pretty much single-handedly go out and solve a murder,” said DCI Stuart Truss of Essex Police in (BBC Two). “The reality is, it’s really complex. It takes time. It takes people.”
The programme was a police procedural in the truest sense, documenting hour-by-hour the work that goes into identifying and catching killers. The murder victim, 36-year-old Courtney Valentine-brown, was found in a blood-soaked flat. He had been subjected to a sustained beating; the fatal wound was from a knife plunged into his leg with such force that the blade came out the other side.
The 50-strong team collected evidence. An elderly downstairs neighbour described hearing someone being thrown to the floor as if by Sumo wrestlers. A witness reported four people going into the flat, naming two of them as Kelly King and Ian Slater. But there was no murder weapon and no direct link between the suspects and the murder. King gave stubborn “no comment” interviews and for most of the episode Slater was one step ahead of the police. A friend of Slater’s called him “a genuinely nice bloke” and said he couldn’t possibly have killed a man. Cut to a search of Slater’s flat which uncovered a combat knife, a knuckle-duster, a baseball bat and a stick covered in barbed wire.
As a study of how such investigations are carried out, it was interesting, particularly the use of drones and Google Earth, the planning of raids with armed backup, and the work of the blood pattern expert. But a lack of information about the victim save for one photograph of him, bespectacled and smiling, left a void. I resorted to Google, and read that Valentine-brown was described as “cheeky but lovable”. He was also a drug dealer. Perhaps this was why the programme-makers chose to tell us nothing about him, but it meant we were emotionally uninvested.
Flesh and Blood ★★★★ Murder 24/7 ★★★