He had been triply murdered ... and deserved all three deaths
THe Man With Two Left Feet: what a title for a detective story. Here’s the plot — police are hunting a barefoot serial killer whose footprints clearly reveals he has . . . you guessed it. Two left feet.
in a thrilling denouement, our hero — a maverick police inspector — deduces that the murders were in fact committed by two one-legged men wearing a single pair of trousers as a cunning disguise.
As it is, Saturday evenings are looking awkward enough for anyone, like me, with two left feet. Strictly Come Dancing on BBC1 and its iTv copycat, Stepping Out, have limited appeal — i can enjoy the glitz and the banter, but the main attraction, the dancing, leaves me cold.
Luckily, there was a crimefest over the weekend. On iTv3, Saturday night was wall- to- wall murder repeats, starting with Wycliffe, then Morse, Foyle, Midsomer, Wire in The Blood, and ending with Robbie Coltrane’s classic Cracker.
Better yet, there was a stack of f resh crime, all of i t starring maverick inspectors.
Vera (iTv) and What Remains (BBC1) are pitted against each other in the schedules. When they began two weeks ago, Brenda Blethyn’s sharp-tongued mother-hen came off slightly worse, but the series has got steadily stronger.
Last night’s story was gripping from the first moment, with a bunch of students swigging cider and playing guitars round a lakeside camp fire. One of them tried a few bars of Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water . . . and broke off as a man engulfed in flames burst out of the bushes and flung himself screaming into the lake.
He had been triply murdered, DCi vera Stanhope discovered: he had suffered burns no one could survive, he had set himself alight after a dose of deadly nightshade poison drove him insane and the official cause of death was drowning. it turned out he deserved all three deaths — he was a sadistic bully, a stalker and an investment banker to boot.
Blethyn has said that she based her accent for vera on Cheryl Cole. Cheryl must have been in a filthy mood that day, because vera never stops muttering and criticising.
When a nervous witness got too talkative, she snapped: ‘Only got to see a police officer and they start confessing to anything from losing a library book to cheating on their missus.’ Her character was shown in a more revealing light, though, when she was reunited with the elderly nun who had been her schoolteacher, and who forced vera to face harsh childhood memories.
The characters in the slow-burning drama What Remains, starring David Threlfall as a retired detective following up one last investigation, seemed strongly drawn in the first episode.
Now, as the plot twists, a straightforward story is making less sense. What does the heavily pregnant vidya, played by Amber Rose Revah, see in boyfriend Michael (Russell Tovey)? He’s a thief, a whiner and he can’t even be bothered to stay faithful.
And now we realise that the murder victim was well known by everyone in the house, how come nobody noticed when she disappeared? Did they all have a hand in her killing? The cast is excell ent, especially Threlfall and David Bamber as the creepy maths teacher. But the final chapter next week will have to be brilliant to resolve those questions.
The Young Montalbano (BBC4) opened with a lovely sight gag: as a young man, our maverick detective (Michele Riondino) had a mop of curls and a beard. Fans of the Montalbano series will know that in middle age he is bald.
Montalbano is Sicily’s answer to Maigret or Morse, an oldfashioned sleuth. All his defining traits, such as his love of good food, were already in place as we saw him meeting lifelong colleagues for the first time, including journalist Nicolo Zito and the bumbling Catarella.
The programme is subtitled, but it’s a treat for anyone who enjoys classic detective stories. Montalbano has a habit of neatly explaining his deductions to his slow-witted sidekicks. So you don’t have to run to keep up.
Handy if you’ve got two left feet.