Channel 4’s suspect attempt to have a European edge
James Nesbitt plays a detective – his fourth in the space of a year, by my reckoning – in Suspect (Channel 4), and what an odd little drama it is. It is adapted from a Danish series and directed by a Belgian, and instead of feeling like a British show (because, surely, that is what Channel 4 is here to provide) it feels distinctly European. In the opener, Nesbitt and Joely Richardson deliver their lines as if they’re getting to grips with a foreign language.
It’s very weird, but not the first time this has happened. Last year’s Channel 4 drama Before We Die was a remake of a Swedish series, and it had the same problem. It also had the same writer, Matt Baker (Professor T and Hotel Portofino). Perhaps it’s all about selling these shows abroad, and wanting viewers in Europe to feel that they’re watching something recognisable. Suspect was filmed in London, but the location is never specified and it has a generic quality.
We begin with Danny (Nesbitt) visiting the mortuary on what he thinks will be a routine bit of police business about a dead body, and discovering that the victim is his daughter. Each episode will introduce a new suspect, and the cast has some decent names, including Anne-marie Duff and Richard E Grant. Perhaps one of them could lift the material, but neither Nesbitt nor Richardson (as the hospital pathologist) could manage it.
Their scenes had the air of a hammy stage play. “Don’t speak to me like that.” “I speak to everyone like that.”
Well, I’m not everyone.” It was so strangely done that I half-expected the corpse to rise up from beneath the sheet and turn this into some kind of Inside No 9 episode. There was evidently a history between the pair; we never found out what it was, but most of Nesbitt’s roles involve him getting off with an attractive woman so that would be a fair assumption.
A grief-stricken Danny refuses to believe that his daughter took her own life, as the pathologist suggests, and is convinced this is a murder case. His boss, played by Ben Miller, turns up offering help, but that’s odd too. They lock Danny in the mortuary. Handily, his daughter’s smartwatch starts beeping away in the evidence jar and gives him a vital clue. So he’s off to investigate. It soon becomes clear that Danny’s relationship with his daughter wasn’t great: he had no idea where she worked or that she had a significant other in her life (Niamh Algar, also doing her best with the material). Introducing one suspect per half hour episode could work well in theory, if only the show was better.
As usual, it was Noel Gallagher who pinpointed a truth. “Everyone’s chasing the Glastonbury moment. You hear it said maybe once every 30 seconds on the BBC over that weekend: ‘What a Glastonbury moment that was.’”
Glastonbury: 50 Years and Counting (BBC Two) wisely avoided doing this. There were plenty of performances, some of which can still stop you in your tracks (REM doing
Everybody Hurts) and others which were chosen for illustrative purposes, as with David Bowie and vocalist Linda Lewis. She recalled dining on magic mushroom omelettes, leaving them so stoned that Lewis believed they were Lancelot and Guinevere in Camelot.
But the film’s aim was to give us the history of Glastonbury, and how it has evolved. How many of the kids watching Billie Eilish or Stormzy are aware of its origins as a CND fundraiser? Johnny Marr described the festival in the mid-1980s as “a lot of people very much over 30, dancing in a field”. Really, it still is. But it has also been a sanctuary for New Age travellers (remember them?), has taken in dance music and gay culture, and gentrified along the way – no more jumping the fence to get in. We were reminded of the years when riot police were called in and people were throwing Molotov cocktails. Michael Eavis expected the council to call a halt to the festival after that. “But they didn’t seem to mind!”
The public may view Eavis, in the words of one contributor, as “a slightly eccentric Somerset dairy farmer who wears shorts all the time”, but he’s also a canny operator and the undoubted star of this film. It offered a window into how he runs things: finding people who know what they’re doing, and essentially leaving them to it.
The programme was long but always interesting. Many musicians explained why Glastonbury is so special. Some of them talked about the spiritual energy, but others were amusing. Ed O’brien from Radiohead talked about the rain
– likening the site in 1990 to the end of
Apocalypse Now, and saying of their drenched 1997 set: “The audience were wretched. In a funny kind of way it was perfect for our music.”
Suspect ★★
Glastonbury: 50 Years… ★★★★