Robson Green
Grantchester S1 E1-2 (ITV)
It’s hard to imagine a TV drama series that could be any less ambitious than Grantchester, in which a 1950s local Cambridgeshire vicar cycles around his parish solving some rural mysteries. You could have made this show 30 years ago with perhaps a cameo from Joan Hickson and it would have looked and felt exactly the same as it does now, here in 2014. Normally these days when a TV company makes a period-set drama you get that oh-so-knowing post-modern ironic edge to the proceedings, a nod and a wink to the audience to say “Yes, we know it’s a bit twee, but actually we’re really rather cool and smart hipsters once you get to know us,” but not here: Grantchester is as painfully earnest and uncomplicated as its lead character Sidney Chambers.
Not that this is a necessarily negative observation, however. There’s a time and a place for something warm and simple that you can wrap around you on a dark autumnal evening while you’re sitting there getting ready for bed, drinking a hot chocolate with the cat sleeping snuggly in your lap while the rain lashes against the window. But you do wonder why no one at ITV noticed that they already made something very similar in terms of a period crime drama set in a university city (Endeavour, not to mention the BBC’s Father Brown daytime adaptations) and also wondered if there really needed to be any more undemanding cosiness in a schedule that already boasts Downtown Abbey on Sunday nights. Read the rest of this entry »
Wire in the Blood S1 E1-4 (ITV)
I’m not entirely sure why, but I never watched Wire in the Blood when it aired on ITV between 2002 and 2008. By rights, this series – based on the crime novels written by Val McDermid centring on clinical psychologist Tony Hill – should have been right up my street, and it was certainly a ratings-winner for the channel, and yet somehow I missed it entirely. It’s not even that I tried it and didn’t like it at the time, it just seems to have completely passed me by.
Of late it’s been rerun on ITV3 allowing me to catch some episodes and give it a try at long last. While the basic concept of a criminal profiler working with the police on major serial crimes was just my sort of thing, I confess I’ve had an uneven reaction to the show after seeing the first two stories which are told in two 50-minute episodes apiece.
The first of these is “The Mermaids Singing” in which Hill, played by Robson Green, is approached by Detective Inspector Carol Jordan (Hermione Norris) to assess whether three recent deaths of men in the fictional city of Bradfield are related. Each have been grotesquely tortured using classical medieval techniques, and before long the matter is put beyond doubt when a policeman is abducted and subjected to an even more spectacularly nasty and gruesome fate. Read the rest of this entry »
Taking the Short View 