Top of this week’s TV cops? Sorry James, it’s no contest
Bloodlands BBC1, Sunday Unforgotten ITV, Monday
Anew thriller and the return of an established one this week, and I know which I preferred. (Big clue: the stars I’ve awarded. Sorry for that spoiler.) The new thriller is Bloodlands, a four-parter by first-time writer Chris Brandon. He sent his script to the BBC unsolicited, where it caught the eye of Jed Mercurio (Line Of Duty, Bodyguard), who is executive producer.
It is set in Northern Ireland and stars James Nesbitt in one of those roles where his facial expression is solely one of tortured, utter woe (see also: The Missing). Luckily, his character is not a woman, or he’d be constantly told to cheer up, love, it t may never happen, then pressed for his phone number, and he’s e’s got enough on his plate as it is.
He plays DCI Tom Branannick, a detective whose se wife, an i nt el l i gence e agent investigating ter- rorism, went missing 23 years ago, just before the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Was she picked off by ‘Goliath’, a serial killer from within the police force ce who was never investigated ated as it might have endangered gered the peace process? Were ere the three other people who o also disappeared picked off?
This is where we’re at after an initial hour of dense, expositional dialogue. Yes, but they’d already know that, you kept wanting to say, particularly after someone had explained, for example, the political and religious sensitivities at play. Yes, but they’d already know t ha hat. They’re Northern Ir Irish. I don’t think the Troubles simply passed them by. And the camera work was most odd. Up, down, zoom in, zoom out, shake it all about. Dizzying. And distracting, but not s sufficient to distract us fr from recognising this as a conventional co police procedur cedural, with conventional script m mannerisms (‘Just leave it… it’s in th the past’) and one of those conventional, troubled heroes who, when not otherwise occupied, stares moodily out of the window of his waterfront property. There were definite plot holes. The car recovered from the lough, which kicked the whole Goliath business off again. How did they immediately know whose it was, given the number plates were missing? That little island. No one thought: I’ll just look over there, see if there’s another tree? Plus, there were clumsy, obvious moments too. The owl necklace that Brannick gives his daughter. We all knew the matching one would turn up on a corpse, right?
Yet. There were some excellent secondary characters, particularly Lorcan Cranitch as Brannick’s boss with something to hide, but what? Or is that all a big, fat red herring? Most importantly, does this have legs? To find out I cheated and looked ahead to episode two, which is just as dense and expositionary and window-gazing, but has rather a stunning ending that you absolutely won’t see coming. And this has made me want to watch the third episode, rather in spite of myself. So there’s your answer, I suppose.
The return of Unforgotten for a fourth series does feel like putting on a pair of comfy old slippers. Here, the detectives seem real, mostly, the camera is held steady, thankfully, and it knows what it does and does it in the most splendidly sure-footed way. It also hooks you in from the off.
As this opens, DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker, whom I could watch in anything, even The Split), has been traumatised by the events of the third series, has been off sick and had been hoping to be signed off for good, but this can’t happen as she is three months off making it to 30 years of service. When I said above that Unforgotten characters feel like real people, I added ‘mostly’ because, given her determination never to become involved in another grim investigation, why does she then refuse a desk job in favour of going back on the road?
But we’ll park that and move on, to her latest case, which is a cold case, literally, as it concerns the headless corpse found in a dumped freezer. (You should have taken the desk job!) It’s a male, for a change, with, in his back pocket, a Marathon wrapper, suggesting that he may have been in there for 30 years, as Marathon changed its name to Snickers in 1990. Nice detail. However, what makes this series so above average is Cassie’s relationship with her sidekick, DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar), which isn’t based on sexual tension and isn’t based on ‘bants’. Instead, they share a deep, caring friendship that always feels authentic.
As ever with this series, the first part introduced us to many characters who appear unrelated. There’s Liz (Susan Lynch; could also watch her in anything), who is looking after her horribly mean mother (a brilliantly obnoxious Sheila Hancock); a businessman who seems to have a shady past; a family therapist who objects to laminate flooring; and a fella in Southall with a wife whose pregnancy might not be going smoothly. This does dart about all over the place, but right at the end of the episode we understood how they are all connected. And are hooked.