A new woman copper’s on the beat, but she just looks baffled
Great songwriters call it ‘the hook’ — those few notes of melody that get lodged in your brain and drag you in, compelling you to listen. Great crime dramas have it, too, and king of the hook is Sweden’s Hans rosenfeldt.
Hans created the Bridge, the 2011 serial that opened with a bisected corpse on the Oresund crossing, its two halves lying across the SwedishDanish border.
that’s a fantastic hook: a barbed, contorted image that twists its way into the viewer’s imagination.
So it was a real disappointment that his latest show, Marcella (ItV) — set in London and starring anna Friel — had no hooks at all, nothing to snare us and hold us fast.
Instead, the first of this eight-part series drifted with a dreamlike quality that was beautiful and disturbing, but completely unmemorable.
Marcella has blackouts. She can wake up in the wreckage of her living room or smeared with blood in a bathroom, with no recollection of how she got there. We’re supposed to be intrigued, wondering what crime she might have committed — but instead, like her, we’re just confused.
rosenfeldt’s stories tend to introduce a lot of characters early on, and it’s often several episodes before we work out how they connect to each other.
that template applied here: Sinead Cusack was a dodgy businesswoman with a nasty line in veiled threats, whose ice maiden daughter was sleeping with Marcella’s husband.
Ian Puleston- Davies played a
MOVIE REFERENCE OF THE NIGHT: Plebs (ITV2) returned with our heroes facing death by wild beasts in the Roman arena. ‘Whatever comes through those gates,’ gulped Marcus (Tom Rosenthal), ‘we’ve a better chance if we work together.’ That did sound more noble when Russell Crowe said it in Gladiator.
psychotic killer in prison, who, for reasons unclear, was allowed out every day to work in a bakery and sit outside pubs chatting to journalists.
Meanwhile, newcomer Florence Pugh played a prostitute and thief with no apparent link to any of this.
With a deep enough hook, none of this muddle would matter. We’d be hauled along, unable to break away.
But Marcella had little to hold us: it was an impressionistic swirl of raindrops on taxi windows, Friel’s blood and tears, shattered glass in picture frames and fragmented echoes of business meetings.
Friel, who caught our attention in 1994 with tV’s first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on Scouse soap Brookside, was doing everything she could with the role. Her action thriller american Odyssey, which was supposed to be the new Homeland, fizzled and fell flat last year.
Now, she had a chance to join the ranks of female coppers — tV’s most exalted club — alongside the likes of Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley, Nicola Walker in river and Unforgotten, Keeley Hawes in Line Of Duty and Scandi stars such as Sofie Grabol in the Killing and, of course, Sofia Helin in the Bridge.
Most of the time, Friel just seemed to be wondering what was going on, with the suspicion nagging at the back of her mind that she’s picked another duff script. James May’s new series The
Reassembler (BBC4) looked like it might be a pointless duffer, too.
the former top Gear presenter shows us how to rebuild household mechanical objects, starting with a petrol-driven lawnmower, from a heap of components.
It proved to be 30 minutes of likeable entertainment — not because many of us care how the throttle works on a 1959 Suffolk Colt mower, but because May was so blissfully in his element.
With his long grey hair and newly sprouted white beard, he has gradually become, as he tinkers in his shed, the nation’s grandad.
When he is uneasy on camera, May has a depressing tendency to turn into a bad Jeremy Clarkson impersonator, mimicking Jezza’s rhythms and jokes. Here, he was simply himself.
Holding up the lawnmower’s carburettor, he remarked that the internal combustion engine was one of the two defining inventions of the 20th century.
‘the other,’ he added, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘ was the microprocessor.’
Smart alec Clarkson might have said ‘the Barbie doll’ or ‘ the Lycra bodystocking’ — anything but the obvious and banal ‘microprocessor’.
But May didn’t care about being clever or witty: he was too much in earnest and concentrating too hard as he slotted the piston rings into place. at the end of half an hour, the mower was working — and that was all he cared about.