Black Work versus Lethal White

ITV has just re-run a three-part crime series from 2015, Black Work, starring Sheridan Smith. It's been interesting to compare this show, written by Matt Charman, with the current series of Strike, the private detective show based on novels by J. K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, and adapted for TV by Tom Edge.

First to Black Work. It starts with a familiar scenario - a husband dies and his wife discovers that he was leading a secret life. The wife in question is PC Jo Gillespie, played compellingly (as usual) by Sheridan Smith. Her husband was an undercover cop and it soon becomes clear that he took his undercover activities to exceptional lengths. But he was murdered and there's a mystery about his death. Is someone in the police hierarchy covering something up?

Jo's colleagues and superiors are played by a glittering array of actors - Geraldine James, Douglas Henshall, Phil Davis, Ace Bhatti, and Matthew McNulty. Perhaps none of them are above suspicion? I thought that Charman did a very good job of juggling his cast of characters and moving the story on with pace. Very watchable. At the end of the final episode, Jo is promoted, and one assumes that further series were contemplated. Why they have failed to materialise, I don't know, but Black Work made for good viewing.

I enjoyed the second and third series of Strike rather more than the first. They too were both written by Tom Edge, and I had high hopes for Lethal White. After three of the four episodes, however, I'm very disappointed. The story has from the start been bogged down by an excessive focus on the relationship between Cormoran Strike (played admirably, as always, by Tom Burke) and his sidekick, played by Holliday Grainger. A double-stranded murder plot has also become tedious. I no longer really care whodunit. I haven't read the book, but the adaptation feels flabby in comparison to the taut writing of Black Work. It's the old, old story - given the talent of those involved, this series would surely have been much better had the material not been stretched out beyond its natural length.

In Praise of Inside No. 9

The fifth series of BBC 2's Inside No. 9 ended last night with another twisty black comedy, the cleverly titled Stakeout. Until a few weeks ago, I'd never watched this series, written by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. but an article in the Sunday Times prompted my interest by drawing a comparison with Tales of the Unexpected, a highly popular anthology series in its day which featured some good stories and some good actors (plus great opening titles and theme music!), even though when you watch it now, some of the episodes seem very dated.

So I took a look, and soon I was hooked. Binge-watching is something I rarely do, since there is never enough time, given all the writing projects I have on the go, but the irresistible appeal of Inside No. 9 meant I changed my ways. Thanks to iPlayer, I've now watched every episode and they have left me lost in admiration of the brilliance of the storylines. Pemberton and Shearsmith are also accomplished and versatile actors, who take key roles in every episode, and the quality of the scripts attracts actors ranging from Kenneth Cranham and David Morrissey to Felicity Kendal and Sheridan Smith. But in this post I'd like to focus on the quality of their writing. It's so good that I want to watch each episode all over again, to appreciate more fully the subtleties of the scripts.

Inside No. 9 is really unclassifiable. Its defining features include dark (sometimes very dark) humour and startling plot twists, as well as claustrophobic settings linked (often tenuously, but that doesn't matter) by the number 9: a police car, an art gallery, a house where the owners are about to move, and so on. Fawlty Towers, Jonathan Creek and some episodes of Blackadder - three of my all-time favourite witty TV shows - illustrated the potential of a tightly confined setting, and Inside No. 9 rings the changes with extraordinary flair.

It's not a crime series, and the emotions evoked by the stories (as with The 12 Days of Christine, a terrific vehicle for Sheridan Smith) vary widely, but as you would expect, tropes from fiction's most popular genre often feature. One character in Stakeout made fun of the familiar ingredients of cop shows, although of course the pay-off was not what we'd been led to expect. This ability to keep confounding expectations is one of the hallmarks of high calibre writing, whether your name is Shakespeare, Dickens, or (yes!) Agatha Christie or Anthony Horowitz; and Pemberton and Shearsmith are first-rate writers. One episode I admired enormously, Once Removed, is a superb example of reverse chronology, a technique very difficult to master. Another is a story about a burglary with no dialogue. Hotel Zanzibar is a nod to Shakespearean comedy and the characters speak in iambic pentameter. 

Private View is a take on And Then There Were None, with a pastiche of Theatre of Blood thrown in. (Incidentally, the sheer number of contemporary stories which use the And Then There Were None tropes shows the depth of the impression Christie's novel has made on our culture). Even better was The Riddle of the Sphinx, in which crosswords and word play feature, before a truly shocking finale. And then there is Misdirection, possibly my absolute favourite episode (though how can one choose from such riches?), a brilliant updating of the John Dickson Carr/Clayton Rawson kind of conjuring trick mystery. If Pemberton and Shearsmith wrote detective novels, they would be huge stars in our firmament. I doubt they have many ambitions in that direction, but it's our loss.

I could go on and on, but you've got the picture. I've become a huge fan of Pemberton and Shearsmith as writers - and as I say, I'm also impressed by the range of their acting (I mentioned Shearsmith's performance in The Widower on this blog six years ago). I can't wait for the next series.

Cilla - ITV episode 3 review

Cilla, the final episode of which aired this evening, has been ITV's most successful drama since Broadchurch. It's not a crime show, but I've really enjoyed it, not least because it's offered a wonderful recreation of the Merseybeat era, which formed the backdrop for my personal favourite of the Harry Devlin novels, Yesterday's Papers. A framed cover of the book still hangs, I'm told, in the Cavern Club, and the original Cavern was where Cilla Black made her name in the Sixties.

The success of the show, scripted by Jeff Pope, owes a huge amount to Sheridan Smith's performance as Cilla. She's such a warm, entrancing actor, and her singing is fantastic. At the end of episode two, her performance of Cilla's first number one hit, Anyone Who Had a Heart, was stunningly good. So good, n fact, that it seems to have propelled Cilla's original version (itself a cover of Dionne Warwick's version, written and produced by Bacharach and David) back into the Top 40 after so many years.

The story is a simple one - a Liverpool girl with a powerful voice overcomes obstacles to find fame and fortune - but edge was added in this episode by the focus on her manager, Brian Epstein, whose life spirals out of control as he struggles to combine looking after Cilla and the Beatles with a sequence of personal disasters. Tom Stoppard's son Ed was very good as Epstein.

I loved the recreation of Cilla's famous recording of Alfie, with Burt Bacharach demanding take after take in his quest for the perfection he took for granted with Dionne .As the Youtube version of the original session at Abbey Road shows, it was quite an occasion. Cilla was certainly lucky to have the chance to record two of the finest pop ballads ever written, but she made the most of her good fortune.

At the end of episode three, I was left marvelling at the range and ability of Sheridan Smith. I'm often asked which actor I'd like to play Hannah Scarlett, in the (perhaps unlikely) event that the Lake District Mysteries ever make it to the small screen. After watching Cilla, I'd certainly say that Sheridan Smith would have a place on my list of ideal candidates. To quote from another great song, I can dream, can't I?.  

The Widower, DCI Banks, Line of Duty, and other TV crime dramas

The Widower, written by Jeff Pope, and based on a true story, is the latest of the crime dramas coming so thick and fast on British television screens at the moment that I'm finding it difficult to keep up. The first two (of three) episodes have been quite gripping, even though the story follows, in some ways, a slightly predictable pattern. Reece Shearsmith plays the eponymous nurse, yet another of those menacing medical professionals who exploits the availability of drugs in hospitals for nefarious purposes. Sheridan Smith plays his first wife and victim with her customary excellence, and all in all this is a good example of how true crime can be turned into very watchable faction.

I've managed to catch up with another two-parter in the DCI Banks series. Bad Boy benefited from a taut and very well-constructed script by Catherine Tregenna, and the highly effective way in which Banks' personal dilemmas were integrated with the main kidnapping plot, and a sub-plot about a bungled police operation meant that this was probably the most gripping entry in the series so far.

I really ought to have said more about Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio's excellent six-parter about corrupt police officers, which came to an end recently. Keeley Hawes was superb, but so was the cast as a whole, making the most of a convoluted story that cleverly combined in-depth characterisation with twisty plotting. I missed the first series of Line of Duty, which I now very much regret. This was really good telly.

All this and other shows ranging from Shetland and Vera (both of which occupy similar territory to DCI Banks), and the excellent Sherlock to the cosier entertainments supplied by Jonathan Creek, Father Brown and Death in Paradise, and imported shows such as the very good Salamander and the promising Inspector De Luca mean that there is something for all crime fans on the box at the moment. The admirable Lewis may have ended, but a new series of the very well written Endeavour is imminent. I haven't even mentioned American shows such as Elementary and True Detective - and that's because, I must admit, I simply haven't had time to take a look at them.

Anyway, I'll be away from the television for a few days as I go on my travels, but I've scheduled posts for Wednesday and Friday as usual. I may not have internet access,so forgive me if I'm slow to post or reply to any comments - but I will of course always delighted to hear your views. 

Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb: BBC TV review

Jonathan Creek returned tonight on BBC 1 with The Clue of the Savant's Thumb, a brand new episode written by David Renwick and starring Alan Davies as Creek and Sheridan Smith (whose acting career has been hitting the heights since we last saw her in this series) as his "Watson", Joey Ross. The supporting cast included Joanna Lumley, Nigel Planer and Rik Mayall, which indicates the focus of the show on "feelgood" television. And there's nothing wrong with the feelgood factor, especially after the winter we've had.

This story presented us with two mysteries. Fifty years ago, in a strict convent school, a young girl died in bizarre circumstances. Her death has haunted her old schoolfriend, played by Lumley, ever since. Now, Lumley is married to a terminally ill man (Nigel Planer) and is having an affair with her husband's GP. Her husband's blood-stained body is found by their adopted daughter. Lumley takes a photograph of the apparent crime scene. But by the time the emergency services arrive, the body has disappeared...

Meanwhile, Jonathan Creek has married and moved into the glitzy world of marketing along with his glamorous and wealthy wife. Joey tracks him down and persuades him to take an interest in the case, which is being investigated by Mayall, a brilliant detective in his own right, who is now confined to a wheelchair. There are plenty of clues, and even more red herrings, before first the old mystery is solved and then the puzzle of the disappearing corpse is explained, before a slightly cartoonish finale borrowed from a political conspiracy thriller.

David Renwick is a witty and clever writer, and his enthusiasm for the work of John Dickson Carr - which I share - is the key to what is most enjoyable about the Jonathan Creek storylines. Of course, you have to suspend your disbelief, but with Jonathan Creek, as with the Dickson Carr stories, the breezy writing means this is no hardship.

One of the great things about the success of Jonathan Creek is that it has shown that the classic elements of the traditional detective mystery can be adapted with great success for modern readers and audiences, if the writer is good enough, and shows respect for the form, rather than merely attempting pastiche (though I'd add that there have been a number of parodies and pastiches of Golden Age detective stories that I've really enjoyed.) This latest episode was entertaining, although I didn't think it was quite as effective as the last, The Judas Tree, but it may be that others will take a different view..

Impossible crime stories have long appealed to me, and I've written several over the years; short stories rather than novels, though. Just as Jonathan Creek tends to work better in a one hour episode than a ninety minute episode like this one, so do locked room tricks tend to be easier to pull off in short stories rather than novels. One of those stories, suitably adapted, forms the basis of my Victorian murder mystery event, "Who Killed George Hargrave?" This was performed a couple of weeks back at Holywell, in North Wales, by an excellent cast of library volunteers.

What interested me about this event (and another, at Knutsford a fortnight earlier) was that it was a sell-out, gaining much larger audiences than I find conventional talks or writers' panels tend to attract. In fact, I gave a talk about the locked room story as part of the event, and during the questions, again I was struck by the extent of people's enthusiasm for this type of story. As reaction to my Friday Forgotten Books posts shows, there is still a huge amount of interest in classic detective fiction - in fact, I'm certain there's more interest in it today than there was a few years ago. Jonathan Creek shows that this is not simply a matter of nostalgia. We still love a mystery, and there's plenty of room for the elaborate puzzle today, alongside all those relentlessly dark stories about autopsies and serial killers.

The Judas Tree - a Jonathan Creek review

The Judas Tree was both written and directed by David Renwick, and for me, it was ninety minutes of TV heaven. A marvellously entertaining Jonathan Creek story, with that combination of wit and ingenious plotting which has become Renwick’s hallmark. John Dickson Carr would surely have loved it, and I think that any fan of classic ‘impossible crime’ mysteries would love it.

The opening is gripping – in 1988, two young women are driving in the windswept countryside, when one of them, Emily, sees a strange house in the fields. The house suddently disappears, and when she goes to investigate, she is almost seized by a mysterious old man who emerges from the undergrowth. But she fights him off and escapes.

Fast forward to the present day, and Emily takes a job in the household of a detective story writer with a glamorous wife and an enigmatic housekeeper. The wife tells her a story about a seemingly impossible crime, committed in the grounds of their house, Green Lanterns, in the nineteenth century. The timing of the victim’s death was foretold, to the very minute. And soon the wife receives a message, apparently in Emily’s hand, warning of her forthcoming death….

Jonathan investigates with his customary mixture of bewilderment and brilliance, aided by Sheridan Smith, from whom Emily has sought help. The initial mystery of the vanishing house is easily explained, but the crimes at Green Lantern, both ancient and modern, prove rather more complex. Quite a bit of information is concealed from the viewer until a late stage, which might have some purists shaking their heads. I was left with one or two unanswered questions (a second viewing might resolve them) but, most of all, with renewed admiration for Renwick’s gifts.

Alan Davies is excellent, as ever, as Jonathan Creek, while Sheridan Smith, Paul McGann and Ian McNiece (who has appeared in countless TV mysteries over the years) are also well cast. Natalie Walter, who plays Emily, is so very attractive that she can’t possibly be guilty – can she? And a special word for Doreen Mantle, who plays a key part in the story-line as the housekeeper at Green Lanterns. She appeared regularly as Mrs Worboys in Renwick’s One Foot in the Grave, and her interaction with McNiece is one of the many joys of this terrific mystery.

How does it compare to last year's enjoyable special, The Grinning Man? My instant reaction is - even better.