Anna does a good turn

IWAS relieved to see Anna Friel’s detective character MARCELLA (ITV) still having those funny turns of hers. By which I mean those sudden, uncontrollably violent outbursts, following which she’s left with almost no recollection of what she’s just done, merely an overwhelming sense of dread, fearing that in those missing moments she may have unwittingly committed some truly unspeakable act.

Yes, those funny turns. It looked for the first 38 minutes of last night’s episode, the first of series two, as if DS Marcella Backland had been cured of them. But then came the scene where, in a blind panic, she chased down the vehicle in which her son had just accepted a lift home from school – perfectly innocently, as it turned out, from his dad’s new girlfriend, not that Marcella knew this – and hauled out the somewhat bewildered driver, frantically lashing out at this woman until a burly security chap stepped in.

Here was confirmation at last that Marcella wasn’t nearly as mended as we might have imagined.

And yes, sorry to sound harsh, but this was good news. Please don’t misunderstand me. Marcella’s funny turns, I know, are a terrible affliction. They’re not actually funny per se. What they are, however, is her unique selling point and every TV cop needs one of those.

Without them, would anything really set this show apart from so many others of its ilk? Friel refers to it as a “powerful London-based noir drama” (its writer being Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of The Bridge, the Scandi series that’s as noir as noir can be).

And its latest harrowing case, the hunt for a child killer, certainly lives up to that billing – it even has Keith Allen in it and when did he ever play anyone less than despicable?

But I must confess I’ve grown both wary and weary of this “noir” label. Too often it’s become an overly grandiose substitute for “remorselessly bleak” or “soul-crushingly depressing” or “good grief, isn’t there something a bit cheerier we could watch, such as an old Hairy Bikers episode?”

“Noir” has become the label dramas adopt when, rather than cleverly balancing light and shade, the mark of truly engaging crime writing, they subject us to shade and, well, more shade, as if this is somehow more artistically valid.

Or it could just be me, I suppose. After all, “multilayered” is another label Marcella is very proud of and I do tend to read that as: “By episode three you’ll have lost all track of what the heck’s going on…”

The overriding mood of a real-life police drama, on the other hand, as underlined by 24 HOURS IN POLICE CUSTODY (C4), is mostly one of mundanity and matter-of-factness.

They’d chosen a remarkable case with which to resume this absorbing documentary series: a police officer charged with blackmailing a man who’d visited a prostitute. A drama writer would have had a field day with it. And yet here there were few histrionics.

The most typical reactions were of bewilderment from colleagues of this once-respected officer who’d now wrecked his own career (for the sake of a £1,000 demand).

“Caring, compassionate, dedicated, professional, an allround good egg,” was how one colleague had thought of him.

“What an idiot,” was another’s more up-to-date assessment.