Blackmail, murder and 10-inch pizza, but still this didn’t deliver
THERE has been a run of TV dramas that lure the viewer in with gripping early episodes only to deliver the most disappointing of endings. Channel 4’s Kiri was the most recent offender.
But at least it’s not an accusation that could be levelled at Collateral (BBC2) — which was consistently awful from week one.
Last night’s finale was actually the best episode of a bad bunch. Thanks to a dodgy deal she brokered with two illegal immigrants, Kip Glaspie (Carey Mulligan), the world’s most humourless detective, had cracked the case.
A mild-mannered travel agent by day, Peter Westbourne (Richard McCabe) was also the head of an international people smuggling ring. Abdullah, the assassinated pizza delivery boy, had discovered his secret identity and was attempting to blackmail him.
Which is why Westbourne had him bumped off by rogue army captain Sandrine Shaw (Jeany Spark). She suffered from PTSD and was conned into thinking Abdullah was a terrorist when, in fact, he merely delivered 10-inch Margheritas and had a sideline in drug dealing and extortion.
Captain Shaw spent most of last night’s episode stomping around the Home Counties in her camouflage gear, brandishing a pistol and terrorising housewives.
She eventually holed herself up in a hotel room until DI Glaspie arrived to negotiate her surrender.
Except Glaspie accidentally let slip that Abdullah wasn’t a terrorist after all and Shaw killed herself. Whoops.
In the end all the pieces of the jigsaw came together and Glaspie and her crew knew the identity of the main baddie, even if they didn’t quite catch him.
The most ludicrous casting was John Simm, as Labour MP David Mars, whose character contributed nothing to the plot and only seemed to be there to deliver passionate speeches about the rights of refugees.
His sister, lesbian priest Jane Oliver (Nicola Walker) added nothing either — although she did have a lovely kitchen.
And we never did discover the significance of DI Glaspie being a former Olympic pole vaulter. Maybe it was a metaphor for the fact that the plot jumped all over the place. The subject of law enforcement was given much lighter treatment in Action Team ( ITV2), a spoof spy thriller described by its makers as ‘The Naked Gun meets The Bourne Identity’.
Last night the series launched with two back-to-back episodes that followed the exploits of a not-so-crack team of MI6 agents led by Logan Mann (Tom Davis), a pound shop James Bond figure who frequently shot the wrong man and whose seduction techniques left a lot to be desired.
The rest of the team comprises an oversexed female explosives expert, a needy sniper and a clueless work experience lad.
Luckily for Action Team their main Nemesis, Vladimir Schevchenko (also played by Tom Davis), was even more incompetent than Agent Mann.
The head of a tiny Russian republic, he desperately wanted to be the most evil man in the world but kept getting it wrong.
He made menacing calls to Ruth Brooks (Vicky McClure) — the team’s Head of Operations — but forgot to hang up afterwards, meaning she heard the rest of his secret plot to blow up a peace convention. Totally silly with humour very much of the schoolboy variety but it provided some welcome light relief after the oh-so-earnest Collateral.