The Intruders - BBC Two - TV review

The Intruders began on BBC Two this evening with a double-header, the first two episodes of an eight part serialised supernatural thriller. The story is based on a book of the same name written by Michael Marshall Smith, who also writes as Michael Marshall. I haven't read his work (though one of his novels has lurked on my TBR pile for quite a while) but he's a best-seller, and more significantly I know some good judges who rate his books very highly. When I looked him up, I was startled to find that, like me, he was born in Knusford, but unlike me, he moved when young to Illinois. Very different from Cheshire,I bet...

I was really drawn to The Intruders by the fact that the cast is headed by John Simm. I first came across Simm a long time ago, in Cracker and The Lakes, and later I also enjoyed his performances in Life on Mars and Doctor Who. He's a very good actor, and in this show, unexpectedly, he plays an American ex-cop, who has become a writer.

He is married to a glamorous but enigmatic corporate lawyer, played by Mira Sorvino, and there are early clues that she is hiding something from him. But what? The first episode sees a rapid sequence of dramatic and confusing events. A mother and her son are shot dead by an intruder who calls at their house, looking for the woman's husband. A girl commits suicide in her bath. Later, a cat meets an unpleasant end, also in a bath. A conspiracy theorist has his head blown off by that intrusive gunman. What on earth is going on?

Probably the reason why the second episode followed immediately after the first was to give one or two more clues about the story's direction of travel. It was less cryptic, and more gripping, and I started to become more interested in the characters. Plentiful references to the number 9, and the repeated incantation of the phrase "what goes around, comes around" didn't,however,  fascinate me quite as much as the scriptwriter presumably intended. Is the story going to be strong enough to sustain eight episodes? The jury is, I think, still out on The Intruders..

Murderland

I caught up with the first episode of Murderland only 24 hours after it was first shown, which by my standards of TV viewing (I’m still waiting to watch my DVD of The Charmer, which dates back to the 80s) is pretty fast going. The attraction, of course, was Robbie Coltrane, that charismatic actor who was so brilliant in Cracker.

Murderland is very different from Cracker. It’s written by David Pirie, and it features Coltrane as a rough diamond of a cop called Hain. He was called in when a single mother who is also a prostitute was found murdered at home years ago. In this opening episode (it’s a three-part series) events were seen from the perspective of the victim’s lovely teenage daughter, brilliantly portrayed by Bel Powley, although there are glimpses of her in the present day – still tormented by her mother’s brutal death.

One suspect is a dodgy chap who was spotted by the daughter taking photographs (of her) outside her home, but Hain is also in the frame. It seems he was one of the victim’s clients. But can Robbie Coltrane really be a killer? The bloke is practically a national treasure.

I enjoyed this episode. The pace was not exactly frenetic, but the acting was good, and I was sufficiently gripped to want to find out more about the case. I’ll be watching again next week. Or shortly after next week…