by PETER PATERSON Jellied eels, sacred cows
THE location is firstrate — London’s East End in all its vigour and colour, and not as you see it on that increasingly dreary soap EastEnders. But the new comedy detective series Chopratown rather falls down both on the jokes and the crime-fighting.
The star is Sanjeev Bhaskar, the straight man from The Kumars At No. 42, as ex- policeman Vik ( for Vikram) Chopra, now turned chaotic and bumbling private eye. As Chopratown is made by the same team as The Kumars, the comedy follows the same broad style, with ethnicity a strong element.
Bhaskar has taken the risk of having someone rather funnier than he is — Natalie Casey — as his pushy office temp and would- be detective. As Annie Deever, Casey seizes her chance with both hands, solving crimes rather more quickly than her slow-thinking boss, and shrugging off his reluctance to give her any of the credit.
Part of the overall joke is that Chopra tries to adopt the mannerisms of a hard- bitten Hollywood gumshoe — not easy when it’s your turn to look after your baby daughter, while also mounting a surveillance operation over a suspect.
And he pursues cases that, until the final twist, are of the utmost triviality. In the Bogartian tradition, Basienka Blake was therefore drafted in as the desirable dame ( presumably because Lauren Bacall was unavailable).
Blake played Yasemine Ergun, wife of a Turkish baker and apparently concerned that her husband, Ali ( Omid Djalili), was killing himself by his unhealthy lifestyle — eating the delicious pastries his bakery produced, smoking heavily and drinking large quantities of brandy.
Chopra, in a ludicrous yellow hat and chef’s whites, signed on as a pie maker to report back to Yasemine on Ali’s habits. Smitten by her smouldering looks, he refrained from telling her the entire truth, omitting her husband’s shenanigans with buxom employee Maeve (Daisy Dunlop).
Instead, he delivered a moral lecture to Ali, urging him to cease his adultery out of loyalty to his lovely spouse. The angry Ali threatened Chopra with a baseball bat and threw him off the premises, but was later found dead in his office. And the private eye was gleefully arrested by an old enemy and former police colleague, DI Nigel Caro ( Neil Stuke), on suspicion of murder.
Annie, with Chopra locked up, was trying to solve the case of the theft of a cow from a city farm, with suspicion unjustifiably falling on Hindu extremists at the local temple. A letter from the kidnappers warned that in Hindu culture cows are regarded as sacred and should not be humiliated by having to provide entertainment for children.
In quite the best scene of Chopratown, Annie contacted a Mr Das ( Madhav Sharma) of the Hindu Liberation Front, informing him that the theft of a cow was a ‘faithrelated crime’.
Mr Das quietly explained to her that the Front was an organisation taking elderly Hindus — ‘unfortunately, there’s no room for Muslims’ — on mini-bus outings to the seaside.
‘We revere cows in Hindu culture, but we don’t take them on day trips to Margate,’ he said.
It was a subsequent rare flash of insight from Chopra — now released, with apologies — that, since the kidnap note was written on the farm’s own stationery, the loss of the cow might be an inside job.
Stealing the glory, as usual, he prepared to hand over the nowrecovered cow ( which had been spirited away for barmy reasons by the son of the farm’s owner) to a party of schoolchildren waiting to welcome the beast home.
ANNIE, however, had failed to tell him that the cow, which was in the back of a van, was dead from neglect — though anyone could have heard the sound of bluebottles as the doors were opened.
The big crime — the murder of Ali — was cracked not by DI Caro or Chopra, but by the latter’s doctor. Vik is a hopeless hypochondriac, so he helped himself to a jar of Ali’s calming beta blockers, but oddly they made his heart race.
Once the doctor had established that the pills were in fact amphetamines, which have the opposite effect, Yasemine’s plot — with Ali’s younger brother — to kill husband and take over business, was exposed.
An hour was too long for what is in effect a half-hour sitcom. But the East End, jellied eels and all, did look quite spectacular.
Chopratown was billed as a pilot, so the question is whether this was genuinely a trial run or has already been given the nod for a series. If it were up to me, I’d allow Christmas to pass — Christmas 2006, that is — before making up my mind.
THE BBC tried to save admired but neglected buildings with its Restoration series. Channel 4 is on the reverse track, encouraging viewers to tell them which buildings they’d like to see knocked down, in Demolition.
Last night’s episode concentrated on housing, with many demands for tower blocks to be demolished — plus a surprising number who wanted their own homes, even new ones, to be razed.
What is emerging is the tension between architects and the public.
While the professionals drool over the influence of modernists such as Le Corbusier, or tut-tut over Prince Charles’s Poundbury, the punters hate the first and love the second.
Presenter Kevin McCloud tries to hold the ring, but his heart is with the architects. her the