Slick surveillance thriller puts Beijing in the frame
The Capture (BBC One) begins with a cracking sequence and ends with another one, and what happens in between isn’t half bad either. Which isn’t something you can say about too many TV dramas, is it?
You may remember the first series, which explored the world of “deep fake” technology and manipulated footage. A former soldier was accused of murdering a woman after doctored CCTV apparently showed him abducting her from the street. This second series starts by inverting that premise: rather than placing someone in the frame to make them appear guilty of murder, the murderers here have been made to vanish.
As seen on the many security cameras being monitored by the victim, Chinese dissident Edison Yao (Joshua Jo), the automatic doors of his apartment building open, followed by the doors to the lift, and finally the light sensors in the hallway are triggered – seemingly by no one. It’s an arresting start to the story. We are soon reintroduced to DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), who has been assigned to a tedious job in the mapping department of Counter Terrorism Command but is itching to get stuck into something more substantial. She also puts a hair in the doorframe to check that no-one has
broken in, which shows that the world’s state-of-the-art tech can be beaten by Famous Five tricks.
Grainger is not afraid to make her character unlikeable – brittle and uptight, and initially unwilling to help out her former colleagues until one of them (played by the very likeable Cavan Clerkin) is in serious trouble. Nor do we feel much warmth towards Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu), an ambitious government minister. But the real villains here are the Chinese, led by sinister tech mogul Yan Wanglei (Rob Yang), intent upon winning the contract to control surveillance at UK border control through facialrecognition technology. The murder victim was part of a committee advising the government on the perils of Chinese involvement. And when Turner indicates that he won’t be approving the deal – “As long as I’m security minister, Britain’s borders won’t be monitored by a storefront for the People’s Republic of China” – he becomes the target of a conspiracy.
It is slick and well-written, but the show also highlights an awkward truth. You could imagine this series being made by Netflix, Amazon or Apple TV+, which undermines the BBC’S message that it produces the kind of uniquely British content which US streaming services do not.
Adrian Dunbar is… the singing detective! No, not Dennis Potter’s creation, but the star of Ridley (ITV), a new police drama which tries to distinguish itself from all the other police dramas by having its star do a spot of nightclub crooning when not solving crimes.
The only reason the character does this is because Dunbar sings in a band in real life and asked the producers if he could put his vocal talents to use in the show. It feels both ridiculously random – where is this tiny Northern town with a jazz club packed with millennials keen to watch a 60-something retired policeman on stage? – and the only original element.
Otherwise, it was stuffed with cliché. Dunbar’s detective Alex Ridley has a tragic backstory. There’s a no-nonsense female sidekick with a same-sex partner. A disapproving boss, a brusque pathologist and an unsolved case that has haunted our hero for years.
Dunbar does his best with the role of a grieving man who has lost his wife and daughter in a house fire and no longer knows his place in the world after leaving the force. But he deserves a better vehicle than this drama, which required him to convey that grief by looking sad while going for walks.
The plot was fine – a man shot dead on his way back from the pub, linked to the disappearance of a girl a decade earlier, and Ridley brought out of retirement to assist the case. The tired dialogue was another matter. “You can’t solve them all, Ridley. It doesn’t pay to dwell in the past.” We learned that his old colleague (Bronagh Waugh) was an ambitious new DI with a point to prove because another character told her: “You’re an ambitious new DI with a point to prove.”
In dramas such as this, it’s often the character actors in small roles who make an impression. Here it was Erin Shanagher, affecting as mother to the missing girl. She delivered the strongest performance, at the very end, in a scene soundtracked by Dunbar crooning a Richard Hawley tune. Other than that, though, this was a downbeat police drama with no distinguishing features.
The Capture ★★★★ Ridley ★★