Meep meep! That plot hole’s big enough to swallow a roadrunner
When Wile e. Coyote gallops off a cliff in a Roadrunner cartoon, gravity doesn’t take effect at once. he keeps running through the air, suspended by his own disbelief.
And then the truth hits him. he turns to the camera and gulps. The laws of physics kick in, and he plunges. nothing can break his fall till he hits the canyon floor, a mile below.
That’s what it feels like to watch The Bay (ITV).
This six-part series, now halfway through, is an emotional crime thriller with a great cast, including Morven Christie as a police liaison officer dragged into the murderous secret lives of a seaside town after two teenagers disappear.
It’s a world of freezing seafront promenades and derelict arcades, where alcohol and drug abuse are rife. Morecambe, once famous for cockles and comedians, is depicted as the english equivalent of those bleak, sub-zero towns in Scandi dramas.
I want to love it. But like poor old Wile e., my disbelief is in freefall, hurtling down through the plot holes.
The plummet began in episode one, when Christie’s copper, DS Lisa Armstrong, destroyed CCTV evidence rather than confess to her boss that she’d had drunken sex in a pub alley with the teenagers’ stepdad, on the night the duo disappeared.
This made no sense. It also revealed Lisa as a selfish, dishonest, corrupt police officer who forfeited all our sympathy.
Unable to accept her as the heroine, I can’t help finding fault with every other detail — the kind of inconsistencies that usually pass without notice in fast- paced detective tales.
It’s bizarre, for instance, that Lisa’s junior, the wet-behind-theears DC Med Kharim (Taheen Modak), is sent to play social worker to a local woman just because she can’t get out of the bath. That’s not a job for a detective.
And I don’t understand why Morecambe folk clutch their brows and reel at the thought of a trawlerman with £8,000 to spare . . . as if eight grand in Lancashire was worth eight million anywhere else.
how come forensics officers could scrape dried blood from under the fingernails of a body that had been floating in the sea for hours? Why is a man entitled to thousands in compensation, just because he is the biological father (longestranged) of a missing girl?
And here’s the one that really baffles me: we saw DS Lisa take a carton of milk from the fridge, sniff it, recoil, then proclaim it a week out of date . . . and put it straight back on the cold shelf. Who does that?
Truth being far stranger than fiction, it was easier to believe the colossal coincidence on The Supervet (C4). Labrador puppy Bertie had a rare ankle disease that was making him lame, and he needed a joint replacement.
By an improbable chance, his owner Graham was a consultant specialising in ankle surgery for human patients. he knew all the terminology and drew astute comparisons between advances in animal and human medicine . . . but the sight of his dog’s swollen paw made him dizzy and queasy. ‘I could never be a vet,’ he moaned.
One of the pleasures of this long-running series is the insight it brings to our deep relationships with our pets. It’s only when they are in pain or their lives are threatened that we can say without embarrassment how much they mean to us.
Dog-lover Jo was bereft when her springer spaniel Sophie checked in for weeks of physiotherapy at the supervet practice.
‘It’s like I’ve lost my shadow,’ Jo said. Any besotted pet owner can imagine how she felt.