No plodding clichés for this cranky cop
COP SHOWS, eh? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. This week it was a TV tale of two plods. One brilliantly original, The Responder (BBC One, Monday /Tuesday), and the other – Trigger Point which, ah… bombed. First the good news.
Yes, The Responder may sound like something you plug into a socket, but it was a certified hit within five minutes, thanks to an outstanding performance from Martin Freeman – either that, or he’s a secret Scouser. It’s also good to see that Bilbo Baggins has finally found his calling.
Freeman’s Liverpool accent was superb, so much so, you forgot he was acting the role of deeply troubled cop Chris Carson.
Indeed, at times the first of five episodes felt like the best-ever instalment of Police, Camera, Action. We had lone policeman Chris driving in his squad car, while a witness, informant or offender – you could never quite tell – sat in the back, like a grittier version of Marion And Geoff.
Chris’s moral compass was so haywire, it was spinning on its axis. This is what makes him so compelling.
When he attends an old woman who has died, he steals her fags and eats the pea and ham soup brought over by her grandson. Worse still, he’s consorting with a drug dealer. If he doesn’t get shot soon it will be a miracle.
Add to that a strained marriage, and a very ill mother in a care home whom he visits every morning with a marijuana cigarette, and you have a grim picture of police life, one which serving officers are probably cursing as they watch. Utterly compelling. And hilarious.
Now to Trigger Point (ITV, Sunday) which would have been far more entertaining if it had been called Tigger Point. Vicky Mcclure, of Line Of Duty fame, was a top explosives officer. Within moments, her team were trying to unpick a “bomb factory” on an East London estate. Well, hey ho. But was that it? Watch out, the bomb might go off !! Don’t we need a little character exposition along the way? Apparently not. Then it was more than 10 minutes before anyone cut a wire… as Mcclure and her partner Adrian Lester played a game of Twister to reach the right colour wire (gripping!). It was difficult not to wonder why both hadn’t opted for nice careers as sparkies.
Surely, they’d had enough excitement in Afghanistan where they’d fought. This much we did know.
Trigger Point was too derivative and felt little more than a pumped-up procedural. And for a drama produced by Jed Mercurio, I didn’t hear a single acronym. For a lesson in explosive TV, watch Bluestone 42.
Julian Fellowes doesn’t need any lessons in writing TV drama. After
Downton Abbey and Belgravia, he could have happily penned a period drama about the first World Carpet Bowls Championship. I’m already interested – Hugh Bonneville could be the down-onhis-luck England team captain who has fallen out with his uppity valet.
The set-up in The Gilded Age
(Sky Atlantic, Tuesday) involves a penniless Miss Brook whose father has died.
Fortunately she is able to live with two rich aunts in bustling 1880s New York in a very swish house. One aunt is a stick in the mud, but the other, played by Cynthia Nixon (Sex And The City) is game for a laugh, in a restrained posh, uptown way.
It’s being billed as the clash of old money v new money, with the latter represented by the flash newbies who live across the road from the aunts and have built a brash-looking house from “all that railroad money”.
And they said it would never catch on. Anyway, Miss Brook has caught the eye of young George Russell ( flaky Drake from Poldark) from across the road, bringing the prospect of a Romeo and Juliet storyline. Most dramatic incident so far? A dog was saved from being brutally crushed crossing the street.
It’s perilous. They should do something about those beastly fast carriages.
The feature-length opener was intriguing and many will return for more as the Astors and Stuyvesants (no sign of Peter) line up against the garish Russells, and their bossy French chef.
Finally, has a patient ever died in The Good Karma Hospital (ITV, Sunday)? They have of course but for a chronically busy hospital, you get the feeling that nothing bad ever happens. We could do with some like that.
Neil Morrissey and Amanda Redman are the poles-apart bookends in this returning drama, which even treated the arrival of a terrible virus as a little local difficulty. A politician arriving at the hospital was even accorded respect. What sort of parallel world is this?
The only conflict happened on the beach when Neil gave a camera thief a proper Glasgow kiss. Summary justice with a refreshing bottle of craft beer just an arm’s length away. Bliss.