Jolly japes and childish coppers — you don’t get that in Scandi-noir
BOYS’ Own tales aren’t what they used to be. Dogged heroes called Jock, Biff or Sandy no longer ambush enemy paratroopers who die with cursewords like ‘Achtung!’ and ‘Banzai!’ on their lips.
Two-fisted spies like Dick Barton and Bulldog Drummond have been pensioned off. I used to love the safari adventures of teenage big game hunters Hal and Roger. But even though the boys were merely collecting animals for zoos, those books by Willard Price breach all kinds of conservation rules today.
And it’s probably a hate-crime just to own a copy of that boyhood great, King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard, with its superstitious native bearers and slippery witch-doctors.
Screenwriter Anthony Horowitz is best-known for his Forties detective series, Foyle’s War, but young readers will also recognise him for the Alex Rider books, about a 14-year-old super-agent who pursues a shadowy international crime cartel through the world’s most glamorous resorts.
Horowitz’s latest TV thriller, New Blood (BBC1), feels as though it is aimed at that audience. Its two heroes are in their 20s, with ideals and bags of courage but no experience of life’s wickedness.
Undercover fraud investigator Stefan (Mark Strepan), who has infiltrated a pharmaceutical company, was so shocked when his male boss put one hand on his knee that he leapt out of his chair and fled. Later, he could barely bring himself to report the incident to his squad chief — and neither of them knew what to say to the female department manager. What words could make any woman believe a story as depraved as that?
New Blood has murder and gore, but also a juvenile innocence: this is nothing like the cynical policing of Line Of Duty or River.
The sparse dialogue and elliptical plotting of those shows is missing, too. Every salient detail is spelled out and then repeated, the way it is in books for teens — or ‘young adult fiction’, as publishers call it.
When Stefan met Rash (Ben Tavassoli), the trainee detective handling a related murder case, the two were about to compete in an amateur triathlon that looked very much like a school sports day. They spent the race exchanging childish jibes and trying to trip each other up.
New Blood is more or less a police series starring those mischievous Fifties prep school pupils Jennings and Darbishire.
There were plenty of Horowitz touches to make this fun. The death of a man pushed from a tower block was recorded on the victim’s eyeball — though only the viewers saw it, not the forensics team. And before a doctor was stabbed with a scalpel during a medical drugs trial, he was stalked through the hospital corridors by a patient shuffling his bare feet like a zombie.
Mark Bonnar played the chief villain, a politician so steeped in corruption he might as well have horns growing out of his forehead.
As it picks up pace, this sevenpart series could become absorbing. At least it’s not trying to be a Scandi-noir knock-off, like Anna Friel in Marcella last month, so that’s a blessing.
There’s no telling what Safeword (ITV2) is trying to be, but it’s failing catastrophically. This has to be the worst panel game ever screened — a dreadful idea made even worse by useless comedians and celebrity guests so obscure, their own mothers wouldn’t know who they are.
The premise is that a pair of fourth-rate personalities from reality shows — Lydia Bright of TOWIE and Geordie Shore’s Gaz Beadle — turn up to be insulted by the stand-ups. They hand over their phones, so the panel can post obscene witterings on their Twitter accounts.
When the mockery becomes too much, the wannabe celebs can shout their ‘safe word’ to make it all stop.
That concept is nonsense: there’s no humiliation that either Lydia or Gaz wouldn’t endure, if it meant they got their orange faces on a backwater TV channel for an extra ten seconds.
What makes it worse still is that the ‘banter’ is blatantly rehearsed. It beggars belief that ITV2 didn’t just broadcast this swill — they thought about it first.