The cop who visits a psychic to crack a crimewave at the seaside
There aren’t many UK cities left without their own maverick detectives and an unlimited supply of serial killers. Bath has McDonald & Dodds, Leeds has DCI Banks, Oxford has Morse, of course, and even Lerwick in Shetland has Jimmy Perez.
The Scots, in fact, excel, with rebus in edinburgh and Taggart in Glasgow, which leaves the Welsh with some catching up to do. I’m waiting to see crime shows set in ‘Cardeath’ and ‘Murder Tydfil’.
There’s no shortage of gruesome remains in Brighton, where John Simm returns as a superintendent with a taste for the supernatural, in Grace (ITV). Four more fulllength adaptations, based on the books by Peter James, began with a gang staging online murders for a global audience to stream.
roy Grace spends much of his free time trudging morosely along the sea shore. We can only hope he avoids Brighton’s stretches of nudist beach. The nation isn’t ready for a frisky, bare-bottomed detective — Inspector Sauce.
When he isn’t brooding on his missing wife, who disappeared years ago, Grace visits a medium. Despite regular reprimands from his boss, he likes to borrow items of jewellery from murder and kidnap victims, for psychic analysis.
Paranormal harry (Adrian rawlins) didn’t get much screen time. The sidekicks fared worse than the psychic — DS Glenn (richie Campbell) was wounded in a shootout with the cyber-killers, and DC emma Jane (Amaka Okafor) was left in a coma after a hit-and-run. That creates space for the newest member of the team, former vice squad copper ‘Storming’ Norman Potting, played by Line Of Duty’s Craig Parkinson.
In the books, Potting is an unrepentant bigot — racist, sexist, everything-ist. he makes Bernard Manning look woke. he and his gaffer clash constantly: ‘If you make one more racist or homophobic remark I’m going to have you suspended,’ Grace warns in the book. On screen, Potting says nothing racist or anti-gay, because nowadays nobody knows where fiction ends and hate crime begins.
Parkinson is such an exceptional actor, though, that he doesn’t have to say anything. One look at his face and you know his character is thinking something so ripe that breathing a single word could trigger disciplinary proceedings.
The plot itself felt hackneyed and elderly. Nothing dates faster than technology, and this story, revolving around a flash drive for a laptop computer, was clearly dreamed up years ago.
But with a cast as strong as this, plot is secondary. Simm is always compelling — and fans will be delighted he’s reuniting with Philip Glenister on a followup to the time-travel police serial Life On Mars. The new show is to be called Lazarus.
Chris Packham’s new show, Our Changing Planet (BBC1), is more concerned with whether there will still be Life On earth.
his team of presenters plan to monitor ecological tipping points round the world over the next seven years, to gauge the effects of climate change. On at 7pm, the series is aimed at a young audience, which meant awkward attempts at adolescent humour. Steve Backshall went scuba diving with ‘condoms for coral reefs’ (handheld nets to catch young coral cells) while ella Al-Shamahi worried about eating snake and rat in Cambodia.
Chris joined whale-watching scientists who used drones to scoop up ‘whale snot’ — the spray from a humpback’s spout.
‘I think that might be the coolest bit of science I’ve ever seen,’ Steve crowed, as a researcher scanned a pregnant manta-ray with an underwater ultrasound device.
The locations were beautiful, the intentions laudable, but it was all a little childish.