The Herald - The Herald Magazine
ALISON ROWAT’S REVIEW
IMAGINE the hell of a Jobcentre interview if you are a maverick TV detective. “So, you’ll only consider vacancies in a sector that is hopelessly overcrowded and outdated, and where the longevity rate is that of an arthritic canary who takes up cat-taming? AND you’re a woman? Buck those ideas up, lady. Next you’ll want to be something totally useless, like a TV reviewer.”
The stars of Bancroft (STV, Monday
Thursday, 9pm) must have seen those odds and decided they’d go for it anyway. After all, they had a USP in that not one, not two, but three main characters were female: DCI Elizabeth Bancroft (played by Sarah Parish of “Yes, no, yes” W1A fame), newbie detective Katherine Stevens (Faye Marsay) and forensic scientist Anya Karim (Amara Khan). They had a decent yarn: an unsolved murder from long ago in which Bancroft, then just a WPC, was the one who found the body. And they had four nights running on prime-time ITV to do their thing.
Alas, good intentions and all that. Despite the strong female presence, and a woman writer, Kate Brooke, the entertainment was still built around a young woman being murdered in extremely violent fashion (a scene repeated many times), and it did not take long for the initially too cool for feminist school characters to start making Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction look like Mary Beard.
There is a fine line between thrillingly credible and outright bonkers, and Line of Duty raised the walking of it to an art form. Bancroft stumbled from the off only to regain some of its footing by the end. Enough though for a second series? I think LoD’s Superintendent Ted Hastings would raise an eyebrow at that.
If The Apprentice (BBC One, Wednesday, 9pm) was an episode of Friends, this week’s would have been titled The One Where Sir Alan’s Mates Reduce the Candidates to Puddles of Tears and Self-Loathing. Yes, it was the interview round and it did not disappoint. Claude used to be the panto villain, barely able to conceal his contempt as he picked through business plans for timeshares on Mars. This year the baddie was a lady by the name of Linda, who was big in interior design and fashion. How to describe Linda? Think Joan Rivers without the jokes.