Show was top of the cops
AND so a big welcome back to DCI BANKS (ITV). This country may not be able to make comedies that are actually funny anymore but when it comes to taut detective dramas we’re second to none.
The opening scene of last night’s two-parter took me back to a comedy classic in which DCI Banks star Stephen Tompkinson cut his teeth, Drop The Dead Donkey, in which he played the totally immoral and extremely funny reporter Damien Day.
Day was constantly sexing up his reports, on one occasion leaving a teddy bear that had not initially been present at the site of some catastrophe – and last night’s opener had the camera lingering sadly over a murder scene embellished with toys and dolls. But no unscrupulous reporter had put them there and the next day it turned out that this was a makeshift shrine to a teenage suicide victim and now the scene of a double death.
And so we were off. All the ingredients of a good crime show were here: the teenage suicide victim had lost her mother and lived on an isolated farm with her taciturn and potentially violent father. The body of the murder victim was found by one of her friends whose own mother turned out to be the counsellor for both the suicide and the murder victim.
The murder victim turned out to have been a drug dealer who had possibly fallen foul of an upstanding local businessman, who was in reality a corrupt crime lord whose own teenage daughter knew the murder victim and also ended up not in the best possible situation, namely dead.
Give those scriptwriters a big hand as they managed to cram in more twists and turns than a pretzel on a roller coaster and by the end of the episode I had even less of an idea about who had done it than I did at the start.
The only thing I’m sure of is that the businessman didn’t do it – as that would be too obvious – but he’s in it up to his neck.
I have been a big Tompkinson fan ever since those Dead Donkey days and he’s certainly carved out quite a career for himself since then.
He makes a great brooding copper and is clearly not going to be allowed a personal happy ending as his new-found contentment looks to be dashed when he learns his new girlfriend has been offered a job in Glasgow. Never become a TV detective if you want to achieve personal satisfaction. Just look at Inspector Morse.
And so Nadiya Hussain’s voyage around her ancestral homeland came to an end last night after the second THE CHRONICLES OF NADIYA (BBC1). I’m getting a bit tired of this cooking all around the world malarkey, not least because immediately preceding it we had The Great British Bake Off (see page 7) and over on BBC2 there was Great British Menu. Meanwhile we all sit around on the sofa watching these things and stuffing our faces with fast food.
The real question is, can Nadiya sustain this and turn it into a real career? She would be far from the first reality star to have put her new-found fame to good use and her good fortune is certainly an impetus for many competitors to try for a place on Bake Off for many years to come.
Still, you can’t see the BBC giving that many reality winners a show of their own, and are we really watching the advent of the new Nigella Lawson? I have yet to be convinced.