Criminal? Try Poldark’s new beard and Hastings’ singing!
This week ITV launched a new crime drama in its two-hour, Sunday-evening police procedural slot (Ridley, more on that later), and another new crime drama on Monday evening with a similar title to the one that was recently on Channel 4. (This one is The Suspect, that one was plain Suspect, with James Nesbitt howling all over the place.) Does this signify we’ve now reached peak TV crime drama? Should we march with banners saying: ‘Enough, already’?
But I can never resist. I feel I have to kiss every frog in case one turns out to be Line Of Duty or Bodyguard or Vigil. I am mostly disappointed. This week I was disappointed. Very disappointed in one instance, mildly disappointed by the other. That may even count as a result.
First, the least disappointing, which is The Suspect. This stars Aidan Turner, who is now less Captain Poldark and more Captain Haddock. Blistering barnacles, what a beard! He plays Dr Joe O’Loughlin, a psychologist who, in the opening moments, persuades a teenage cancer patient not to jump from a hospital ledge.
The two of them do nearly fall to their death, and Dr O’Loughlin isn’t very steady as he has early-onset Parkinson’s – disclosed by his doctor who happens to be passing. This plot is mightily beset by coincidences – and now he’s a hero. He’s ‘the rooftop hero’, say the newspapers, yet as the police will ask at the end of the first episode: ‘Rooftop hero or… sick killer?’ Dr O’Loughlin, it turns out, has much to hide. Possibly, he’s even hiding something in that beard. I think you could even hide a getaway car in there.
The MacGuffin here is a dead young woman found in a cemetery with 21 stab wounds. The two police officers on the case are played by Shaun Parkes and Anjli Mohindra. He’s an experienced homicide cop, while she is a rookie. This is what the job involves, he tells her. It’s turning up to the body of a dead young woman ‘knowing there will be another one, and another one, and another one…’
This may have just been a dig at the genre but I found his distress peculiarly moving. They arrange to meet sex workers to discover if the victim was one, and who should turn up while they’re doing so? Dr O’Loughlin, who happens to be researching a book on sex workers. What are the chances? He’s invited to help profile the murderer, but then the police establish links between him and the deceased, and soon his shredder is being put into overdrive and he’s illegally accessing a mortuary while looking shiftier and shiftier and shiftier. Is there an end-point to shiftiness? The full shift?
It is preposterous. Surely the police have rigidly vetted profilers and wouldn’t just pull in a psychologist off the street? Who commemorates his late mother’s birthday with a leaf-kicking jaunt? (Don’t ask.) How can anyone climb out of a hospital window onto a ledge? What hospital window opens more than an inch any more?
But there is bona fide chemistry between the two detectives, Turner is watchable in his endlessly shifty way, plus Adam James and Sian Clifford are both in the cast and have yet to come into play. I’ll give it a whirl as I am intrigued – how will it all hang together? – and also, there’s so much beard it’s hard to take in on just the one outing. If only for this reason I will have to give it another go.
On to Ridley, the very disappointing one. This is a vehicle for Adrian Dunbar, formerly Line Of Duty’s Superintendent Ted Hastings, who plays an ex-detective living in a magnificent lakeside house – I wish the police would pension me off! – but you can tell he’s a sad fella by the way he stares out the window, puts jazz on his record player and sleeps on the sofa. He is bereaved as his wife and daughter were killed in a fire, after which he was forced to retire. But what’s this? He’s still haunted by an old case that was never solved? Might he be drawn back? You know the drill.
This was so familiar, it put me into a stupor. I may have even slept through the second half, but that was OK as I’d worked out ‘the twist’ well before then. It involved a murdered farmer, Jessie Halpin, whom I was half-hoping was ‘H’, as I still can’t believe it was Buckells. Halpin had been connected to a child abduction case that was never solved.
This contained lines that, had I been in receipt of the script at ITV, I’d have struck out immediately. (‘We wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important’. ‘We’re listening now.’) Ridley does have a USP. He plays the piano and sings. He co-owns a jazz club that is never locked even when it’s closed, and the first time he sat at the piano and sang The Mountains Of Mourne a little something in me died. Dunbar isn’t a bad singer but it had been so obviously airlifted in as a conceit it was still cringe-making.
There are two more episodes, and I’ve read that both will end with Ridley at the piano, so my best advice? I’d check out a couple of minutes early if I were you.