Child killers, torture and misery — it’s TV’s bleakest midwinter
Welcome to Grimuary. The New Year has brought a surfeit of bleak, dark telly intent on making sure that we’re not just cold and skint but hopelessly depressed as well.
last week it was BBc1’s luther, a nightly crime serial so relentlessly horrible that it becomes quite literally impossible to tell one goredrenched murder from another.
I tried to catch up on part three on iPlayer, and it took 30 minutes of decapitations and bodies in suitcases before I realised I was watching a previous series.
This week Silent Witness returns, with a serial killer preying on transsexuals, as well as The Prosecutors, a documentary about the 1986 child killings known as the Babes In The Woods murders.
No wonder so many people feel wretched after christmas. A century ago our great- grandparents went to the music halls, to hear a jolly fat man in tartan dungarees sing Happy Days Are Here Again while juggling melons and riding a unicycle. We just watch autopsies and torture sequences.
The catalogue of slaughter continued with Manhunt (ITV), the true story of how dogged detective work finally caught the monster levi Bellfield — though not before he had murdered at least two young women and the schoolgirl millie Dowler.
martin clunes played the met’s colin Sutton, who led the investigation in 2004 and later described the two-year hunt in his memoirs. It’s a relief to watch a sleuth who doesn’t wear an ankle-length overcoat with whisky bottles in the pockets, though DcI Sutton is so short on charisma it’s comical.
As a leader of men, he describes himself as ‘more John major than Winston churchill’ — but even that is flattery. The ex-Pm’s superlatively dull brother Terry majorBall, a garden gnome collector, would be closer to the mark.
The chief inspector is apt to greet colleagues with an offer of: ‘cappuccino? latte? I have to tell you they both taste the same.’ He’s a stickler for procedure and an enthusiast for jargon. An underling with nothing to report dodges an ear-bashing by talking in acronyms: ‘TBc, guv,’ meaning ‘to be continued,’ gets an approving nod.
This is a realistic glimpse into actual policing, where originality counts a good deal less than persistence. To a proper British copper, a maverick is just a Nineties chocolate bar . . . not a brilliant but eccentric crimebuster.
manhunt is a faithfully accurate dramatisation, with a solid central performance from one of the country’s most popular actors. But amid the welter of dour and downbeat television, watching the show three nights in a row is going to demand the sort of stolid determination that was DcI Sutton’s strength.
even more exhausting is Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Les Miserables ( BBc1), depicting an era so harsh that no trip to the funfair was complete without getting your head shaved and your front teeth extracted with pliers.
lily collins was so joyless, so utterly crushed, that it was a mercy whenever the story cut back to olivia colman as the despicable mme Thenardier — who robbed, cheated, wheedled and lied while forcing orphans to scrub her floors, but at least managed a smile occasionally.
Playing the interminably anguished Fantine, lily dragged herself about France, simply pleading for everyone to abuse her. Dominic West tried to save her but, as the ex-convict Jean Valjean, he was more interested in tormenting himself with his guilty conscience.
This was a weary hour of grey rooms, bitter poverty, moonless nights and damp dawns.
Roll on springtime.