Vera and Crimefest

The first series of Vera, starring Brenda Blethyn, came to an end tonight with an adaptation of The Crow Trap by Stephen Brady. The story opens with the murder of a woman who is resisting an attempt to build a new quarry in the beautiful Northumberland countryside, and it soon becomes clear that a mystery from the past is entwined with the puzzle of the present.

This was a well-structured episode, and a suitable finale for what has been a successful first series. Now that the characters and setting are established, the way is clear for the scriptwriters to introduce the variations of tone and pace that will ensure Vera ranks along with Lewis as the leading detective drama for years to come.

A highlight of Crimefest, which opens in Bristol on Thursday, will be an interview featuring Ann Cleeves and TV writer Paul Rutman, discussing Vera. I'm looking forward to this, as well as to Crimefest as a whole. I'll be moderating two panels, including one on Forgotten Authors.

This time last year I went to Crimefest at a point when I was rather down in the dumps, and it really cheered me up. I was due to appear in the Mastermind quiz, and really wasn't in the mood for it, but all was well in the end. And the fact that I was able to put other concerns aside and focus on the quiz itself gave me a good deal of heart in the weeks that followed. So I do recall Crimefset 2010 with special appreciation, and I'm going to enjoy this year's event in a lighter frame of mind. But I'm glad I don't have to do Mastermind again!

Vera: Hidden Depths - review

Vera, starring Brenda Blethyn as DI Vera Stanhope, kicked off this evening with an adaptation of Hidden Depths. It was an interesting choice of story, because the first Vera book Ann Cleeves wrote was The Crow Trap. However, my own feeling when it came out originally was that Hidden Depths was a very strong novel, with an especially gripping opening, and this may partly explain the choice. In any event, if you haven't read them yet, the books can be read out of sequence without any difficulty or major spoilers at all.

Brenda Blethyn makes a very likeable, if at times surprisingly emotional, Vera, and the cast included Murray Head - whom I think of more as a singer, but who was excellent in his role as a catalyst for crime - and Juliet Aubrey, who played his glamorous wife. The North East locations were terrific, as good in their way as the Oxford settings in Inspector Morse. The finale was a touch melodramatic, but that is the way with television dramas, and its setting, in a spooky ruined castle, was very atmospheric.

Having followed Ann's career for so long, it was a great pleasure for me to see her work on the telly at last, so I don't suppose I am the most objective judge, but suffice to say that I thought this was a really enjoyable programme.

The timing of the show is, I think, marvellous, in that we've had a bank holiday week-end, and there is a feelgood factor around in many quarters after the Royal Wedding. I've read that the BBC have ditched Zen because there are 'too many male TV detectives'. Silly reasoning, in my opinion, but at least Vera is an original and refreshing character, as well as (much less important, I think) a woman.

One final point. I've encouraged Ann to contribute some copies of the scripts and materials to the CWA archives. At some date in the future, I hope we will have a fascinating record of the genesis of what I confidently expect to be a long running and very successful series.

The Point of Vanishing

Bit by bit, I’ve been catching up with episodes of Lewis that I’ve missed, and the latest is The Point of Vanishing, first shown in April. It’s written by Paul Rutman, who is responsible for the screenplay for the forthcoming Ann Cleeves television drama featuring Vera Stanhope. I gather that Rutman actually lives in Oxford, so he is ideally placed to be able to create the ‘feel’ of the city when writing for Lewis.

In this story, the key characters are a religious fanatic, and his housemate, and a celebrity atheist and his somewhat dysfunctional family. Early on, a man’s murdered corpse is discovered. Once he is identified as Steven Mullin, the religious fanatic, attention focuses on those with a motive to kill him. Heading the list are various members of the atheist’s family, because Mullin was responsible for a car crash that left the atheist’s teenage daughter permanently disabled.

There are plenty of twists and turns, including a pleasing identity switch (I think I am at least as keen on identity switches as a plot device as I am on locked rooms!) The character of Hathaway is developed by revelations of a failed romance, and for once Jenny Seagrove plays a part in which her enduring good looks are irrelevant, and she behaves unpleasantly throughout.

There were a few aspects of the plot that I found hard to swallow, including a birthday party for the disabled girl in which (because of the demands of the story) nobody paid attention to the birthday girl, enabling her to wheel herself off to a disastrous encounter in a maze. Given that US government security was also in attendance at the event, it did seem rather unlikely that the murderer would choose such an environment to commit his next crime. And the motivation of the killer was not quite credible, at least to me. But as ever, the production values were superb, and the quality of the performances meant this provided a pleasurable couple of hours of viewing.

Lewis and Wallander

I don’t watch many television series these days, but I’ve seen quite a few episodes of both ‘Lewis’ and ‘Wallander’ (originally the Branagh series, now the rather different Swedish series) and this caused me to muse on the merits of both.

The episodes of ‘Lewis’ that I saw came from the last series. ‘The Allegory of Love’ was first rate, and up to the standard of all but the very best episodes of ‘Inspector Morse’. The story starts briefly with shots of a beautiful and mysterious young woman (Katia Winter) before moving to a book launch attended by Inspector Lewis. The book in question is a fantasy novel by handsome Dorian Crane (Tom Milsom) and it soon becomes apparent that his good looks, charm and all-round brilliance have attracted several admirers, and prompted much jealousy. At a regrettably early point, the beautiful young woman is murdered – but was she the killer’s intended victim?

As ever, the casting was excellent. The suspects included such fine actors as Art Malik and James Fox, and for a while I thought Lewis might find himself a new lady, but it was not to be. The plot was pleasingly convoluted, and though credibility was stretched, this was a price worth paying for a thoroughly entertaining story.

I’ve also just seen ‘The Great and the Good’ – this Lewis story benefited from a screenplay by Paul Rutman, who has written the script for the televised version of Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope novel Hidden Depths. Again, it was very enjoyable stuff, the excellence of the acting and the twists of the story-line compensating for the rather unlikely plot.

Across the North Sea, ‘The Tricksters’ also saw the hero-detective contemplating the possibility of an improvement to his love life, though Kurt Wallander enjoyed rather more amorous success than poor old Lewis after picking up a woman on a lonely forest road. For once, though, I thought that the story was not especially gripping. Two young girls discover the body of an apparently pleasant man with a love of horses. But he turns out not to have been pleasant after all. In theory, I prefer the length of the Wallander series (an hour and a half rather than the two hours allocated to Lewis’s investigations) but the simple truth is that the strength of each episode depends above all on the quality of the story.