JK Rowling injects her politics into Strike’s latest case
When JK Rowling donned the invisibility cloak of Robert Galbraith it allowed her crime fiction to be judged on its own merits. Once unmasked, her pseudonym on a book jacket – like her real name on a film poster – became a less certain asset when she joined the gender debate in June 2020. A kerfuffle soon ensued when Troubled Blood, the fifth Galbraith novel featuring private detective Cormoran Strike, included a serial killer who dresses up as a woman.
There’ll be no repeat commotion with Strike: Troubled Blood
(BBC One). Scriptwriter Tom Edge, compacting 900-plus pages into four hours, has ensured that in this version, culprit Dennis Creed abducts women with a smile and a spiked drink but wearing his own cis-clobber. Mischief managed. Phew.
In every other respect, Rowling’s politics are clear and present. At a lively dinner thrown by his colleague, Robin (Holliday Grainger), Strike (Tom Burke) gives both barrels to a pair of puritans from the cancellariat. “F---in’ idiots,” he dubs them before exiting and, having drunk a lot, vomiting.
This delicious setpiece has only a weak link to the main plot, in which a woman seeks closure in the unsolved case of her mother’s disappearance in 1974. Margot Bamborough (Abigail Lawrie), seen in flashbacks, is/was a young doctor whose vocal feminism earn her plenty of potential enemies in the sleazy Seventies.
While we’re on women’s rights, is it heretical to propose that the bright heart of these dramas is not Strike, the gloomy trope in a coat? Isn’t it actually Robin, who does half the detecting and much more of the acting? In this story Burke has plenty of family grief to be even more owlishly glum about than usual. Grainger, meanwhile, dives into the dressing-up box to shunt the story along.
It’s good, competent meat-and-twoveg noir. Some acting on the undercard is a bit teaky, but there are flavoursome cameos from Cherie Lunghi, Kenneth Cranham and – surprise! – Robin Askwith. The avatar of all those saucy sex comedies is reincarnated as an addled memento of the dodgy decade. Call it karma.
If you know the book you’ll know whodunnit. It gives nothing away to say that, eventually exposed, the insouciance of the murderer feels a little off, as if bumping off a load of young women is not to be taken that seriously. Which may be typical of Galbraith, but doesn’t sound like Rowling.
Big Ben Restored: The Grand Unveiling (Channel 4) was, in the end, an episode of The Repair Shop with considerably bigger bongs. The eponymous bell fell silent in 2016 and started to sing again on last month’s Armistice Day. In between, the clock and the tower encasing it were taken apart and put back together without – and it feels slightly unconstitutional to type this – any help at all from Jay Blades and his posse.
Instead our presenter was Dr Anna Keay, director of the Landmark Trust, who has a jolly Lucy Worsley vibe to her. You could tell she was a good egg because she favoured synecdoche, where the part is the whole, over unbelievably boring pedantry: always Big Ben, never (yawn) the Elizabeth Tower.
For six years she popped in on labs, workshops and foundries to follow the story of a remarkable restoration. The casting, glazing, stripping, cleaning, painting, and disassembling of 1,000 clock parts were taken on by many an impressive specialist.
My favourite was Michael Hinchliffe, who cast the new iron work in Halifax and sports splendid mutton chops. Hats off too for Rhiannon Clarricoates, an architectural paint researcher in Lincoln who put an encrustation of 25 paint jobs under the microscope and discovered a whole colour chart. Goodbye black clock hands, chosen to mask London soot. Hello Prussian blue.
Like many a job involving architects, the work went superbly over-budget. Covid also added millions, although in this zesty retelling the pandemic lasted all of two minutes.
In an alternative reality, where money’s no object and film crews aren’t in the way, the story would be worth a whole series of slow TV. Perhaps someone’s shooting one next door in the Palace of Westminster – though as that restoration is projected to last 50 years, documenting it will need another Michael Apted, who spent 55 years on the Up series.
If we’re talking about returning to Victorian templates, a floor of Big Ben once housed a prison for unruly MPS. Perhaps they could restore that one too.
Strike: Troubled Blood ★★★ Big Ben Restored: The Grand Unveiling ★★★★