London Spy - BBC 2 - and TV crime

London Spy, which began on BBC 2 this evening, is the latest in a run of interesting TV crime shows, of varying types, offering varying degrees of entertainment. Before watching, I'd read that the author of the screenplay, Tom Rob Smith, had been interested in the "spy in the bag" case of Gareth Williams, and although he has emphasised that London Spy is not based on that tragic and mysterious real life case, I can understand why its bizarre circumstances fired his imagination.

The show has a lot going for it, including Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent in the cast, but for much of the first hour, it felt like a strong candidate for the Most Excruciatingly Slow Thriller of the Year award. Towards the end, things livened up, but for my taste, the Meaningful Pauses were definitely over-done.  .

From Darkness, which recently ended, was another show of considerable potential which had its moments. But really it seemed like a two-part story padded out with lots of shots of silently anguished lead characters to fill four hours. A real disappointment. In contrast, Unforgotten has gone from strength to strength. It's been my must-watch show since it started, very well written and superbly acted.

I've also admired Beck, the powerful BBC 4 series based on the Sjowall and Wahloo characters, but updated and with brand new storylines. The plots are as varied and ingenious as those in Lewis (still going strong, still a class act) and it's the most impressive Scandinavian thriller I've seen in a long time. Martin Beck's sidekick Gunvald, in particular, is compelling to watch. Beck is a series I can strongly recommend. 

Oxford and History

On Sunday night, immediately after departing from the Harrogate Festival (of which, more soon) I got in the mood for an unforgettable return to Oxford by watching, in a hotel on the outskirts of the city, "The Secret of Bay 5B." This was an episode of Inspector Morse dating back to 1989  This was an episode written by Alma Cullen, whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago, when my Harry Devlin books were first optioned for television, with Alma lined up to write the scripts. It never happened, which was not only the story of my life as regards TV,but also a shame, because she's written many excellent screenplays and proved to be excellent company.

Inspector Morse owed its success, as do its entertaining follow-ups Lewis and Endeavour, to a combination of well-plotted stories, quality acting, and perhaps above all, the wonderful background of Oxford. It was fascinating to see how little the city has changed, in all its real essentials, in more than a quarter of a century, and indeed in the many years since I spent a very happy time there. What changes are the "modern" bits. The richness of its history is an absolutely integral part of the city's appeal. Even if you don't love history as much as I do, being somewhere that has such an extraordinary past is quite a special feeling.

Alma's plot revolved around a corpse discovered in the Westgate multi-storey car park. Yet this is now being demolished - and a good thing too, I have to say; it was a very ugly place. Alma came up with a clever plot twist involving a car parking ticket and an alibi, and one other car-related change is the ease with which, in the 1980s, you could drive down High Street. Not so today. Oxford is now designed to be very unfriendly to motorists, which is fine as long as you don't have to collect loads of luggage from your offspring's college right in the centre of the city...

The occasion of my trip was again offspring-related, as my publicity adviser and ace multi-lingual writer and journalist Catherine Edwards was awarded her degree after four years spent studying German and Italian, not only in Oxford but also such wonderful cities as Berlin and Bologna. It was lovely to see her celebrate her great success in the stunning surroundings of Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre, and to listen to an excellent speech by the Vice-Chancellor reminding us all of the remarkable 800 year history of the university before heading back to Lincoln College for further celebrations. Oxford is a unique place, and my visit on Monday will live in my memory for as long as I'm able to remember.

 

What Remains and the modern whodunit

What Remains maintained to its fourth and final part the appeal that I wrote about in my review of the first episode and David Threlfall continued to perform superbly in the role of the decent but emotionally bereft ex-cop Len Harper.

The claustrophobic shared house setting was brilliantl captured, and although the last ten minutes or so were pretty melodramatic in comparison to the subtle tension-building that had gone before, overall I very much enjoyed the story. While watching it, I was prompted to reflect on the strength of the whodunit as a narrative form, because despite its highly contemporary mood and subject matter, What Remains was a genuine whodunit, with added value in terms of characterisation and, above all, the compelling portrayal of how desperately lonely life can be in the heart of bustling metropolitan London.

Stripped of the moody and dark photography, the storyline was reminiscent of the Golden Age. Almost all the occupants of the shared house nursed dark secrets. Possible motives were lightly sketched (a slight plotting weakness, perhaps?) but almost everyone seemed capable of having murdered the luckless young woman whose body had been found in the attic two years after she was last seen - a disappearance to which hardly anyone paid attention. There was even a "least likely culprit" in the Christie tradition.

If analysed carefully, I'm not sure that - despite its superficially very "realistic" take on modern life - What Remains was much more plausible than many a Golden Age mystery. But on the whole,that didn't matter. It was good entertainment, and offered a story that will linger in my mind for quite a while. This is something that a good whodunit can do -whether it's a modern TV drama, such as Lewis or Vera or Broadchurch, or an older story,such as the better 'forgotten books' that I cover on Fridays. The combination of a mystery to solve, coupled with interesting people and a well-evoked setting has just as much appeal today as it did eighty years ago..

Lewis: Intelligent Design - the end of an era?

Lewis came to a gently poignant end this week after seven series, with a good two-part episode called Intelligent Design. The episode title had a suitable double meaning, since it seems to me that Lewis certainly has been a cleverly designed series. I admit I wasn't attracted to the premise initially. Much as I'd enjoyed Inspector Morse, I didn't think a series of sequels featuring his sidekick would work. But I was wrong.

There was a combination of reasons why they became a success. Kevin Whately is a reliable actor, and what Lewis lacks in flair he makes up for in humanity. His slow-burning relationship with Hobson the pathologist played very well, partly because Claire Holman's portrayal of Hobson was so reserved yet appealing The scripts were generally good, and of course the setting is superb,and the photography made the most of it.

But what I liked about the series above all was a character Colin Dexter didn't create, the new sidekick, Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox. The dynamic between Hathaway and Lewis was, in its way, as engaging as that between Morse and Lewis. And a word, too, for Rebecca Front as Chief Superintendent Innocent. She too was very likeable, and made the most of a fairly limited role.

Intelligent Design was a typically convoluted story, about a professor whose release from prison sparks a disastrous chain of events. There was a cameo performance from another Fox, Edward, and though I didn't believe in the scam at the heart of the story for a minute, that didn't really matter. It was good watching, and overall I'd rate Lewis as one of the very best traditional detective series of the last ten years. I'll miss it. But wait - we're promised Endeavour next. The Dexter franchise keeps on running!

Suspension of Disbelief

One of the great challenges for any crime writer is this: how do you ensure that readers suspend their belief so as to enjoy what you've written to the full? Some writers, of course, may argue that their work is so realistic that no suspension of disbelief is needed. This may be so in a minority of cases, but I'm part of the majority whose contemporary books are meant to have a surface authenticity, but which are nevertheless definitely made-up, with invented characters and incidents. (Mind you, I still include libel disclaimers, just in case anyone gets a very wrong idea.)

As a reader, I'm more than willling to suspend my disbelief in the right circumstances. Of course, the events in a book by fine writers such as Frances Fyfield, Andrew Taylor or Ian Rankin - who all write very different types of crime fiction -are not likely to be replicated in real life. But the quality of writing is such that it draws you into the world of the story, and you are happy to believe in the events that unfold.

The same principle applies when I'm watching TV or a film..For instance, Lewis, like Inspector Morse, demands that you accept that Oxford is crawling with ingenious killers. The homicide rate almost matches Midsomer's. Yet the shows are so well done, that it doesn't really matter that in truth, bicycle theft is probably more of a problem. Skyfall definitely requires suspension of disbelief, but it's so well crafted, that it's easy to accept the various improbabilities.

All this leads me back to the BBC TV series about Father Brown. I've watched all ten episodes of the series, which ended last week. Some were good light entertainment. One or two, however, were pretty unfortunate - the episode combining radiation sickness and paedophilia springs to mind: I didn't suspend my disbelief at any point during that story.

I was sympathetic, as I've said before, to the writers' wish to do something fresh with the stories so as to appeal to a modern audience. But G.K. Chesterton persuaded his readers to suspend their disbelief - not least in some remarkable "impossible crime" stories - by focusing very cleverly on paradox and some interesting observations about human nature. In some of these episodes, I felt not enough of an attempt was made to draw out these qualities in the originals, and what was put in place instead tended to be less than compelling. This was a pity, because it is good to see classic sleuths brought back to public attention. I must say I'm glad I watched the series, but I certainly concede it could have been better. With a bit more credit given to the watching audience's readiness to engage with a good priest's take on the failings of human nature, many viewers, I suspect, would have been more willing to go along with the less likely aspects of the show's premise..

DCI Banks: Strange Affair - review

DCI Banks' latest two-parter, Strange Affair, concluded unexpectedly yesterday. I say "unexpectedly", because for twenty minutes it seemed perfectly clear in which direction the story was heading, and the dialogue felt equally predictable. Yet, all of a sudden, the narrative motored off in a new direction, and I found myself enjoying it very much indeed.

This owes much, of course, to the strength of the plot in Peter Robinson's book on which the adaptation was based. But there was also fine work from a strong cast in which Stephen Tompkinson was at his most anguished and Caroline Catz at her spikiest, while Keith Barron was excellent as Banks's dad. In the end, the story posed a moral dilemma which I'd really not seen coming, and this device worked very well. Importantly, it didn't feel contrived.

Another pleasing feature, for me, of this episode was an element of nostalgia, in that I recognised a couple of locations. After I left law college, I spent a couple of years working in Leeds, a time when money was, to put it mildly, in short supply. I left Yorkshire to work in Liverpool, but I remain a great fan of the White Rose county, and DCI Banks makes good use of the Yorkshire setting, even though it is, admittedly, slightly less dramatic that that of, say, Lewis or Vera.

DCI Banks is, I think,starting to develop into a very good series, and it's reassuring to know that, because Peter Robinson has been so prolific and consistent over the years, there are plenty of story-lines to come. I look forward to the next instalment.

Case Sensitive: The Other Half Lives, episode 2 - and TV dramas' length

Case Sensitive: The Other Half Lives concluded tonight, and a lot of plot development was packed into an hour. This meant that some bits of the narrative seemed rushed – especially in the way that the two detectives got together, seemingly out of the blue. This made me wonder about the pros and cons of splitting up a crime drama like this, in two hour-long episodes, shown on successive nights, in this case a Thursday and a Friday. What is the best way of presenting a TV crime drama?

In the 1980s, the early and best days of Taggart, stories were split into three episodes, each an hour long, shown in successive weeks. This template worked extremely well for the clever and complex Glenn Chandler stories, and I was hooked time after time. For me, this remains classic TV crime.

Conversely, the rather stately place of early two-hour single story episodes of Inspector Morse had a different kind of appeal. One was drawn in by the mood of the show, as well as the story-line (and, of course, the superb acting, high-calibre screenplays, and fantastic setting.)  This model continues to work brilliantly with Lewis, and overall the Oxford-based series are my favourites in the two-hour format. I’ve also enjoyed Inspector George Gently, and Vera, which are based on the same approach.

The Case Sensitive template has been used, for instance, in the adaptations of the books of two fine writers, Peter Robinson and Mark Billingham. I’m not myself convinced, though, that the two-parter is such a great idea. Really, it’s neither one thing nor the other. The Other Half Lives was watchable, but somehow, I felt, more could have been made of Sophie Hannah’s material.

Lewis: The Soul of Genius

The Soul of Genius, with a screenplay by Rachel Bennette, was the first instalment of the new series of Lewis, shown last week. By a happy coincidence, it was screened just before I set off for a week-end in Oxford, and very enjoyable it was too.

Writing for Lewis must, I suspect, be both easy and difficult at the same time. Easy because the basic infrastructure – the characters and setting – are so strong and appealing. Difficult because it is so hard to avoid the trap of formula. I thought Rachel Bennette – not a writer I’m familiar with – rose to the challenge superbly. It’s one of the best crime screenplays I’ve watched for a long time.

I say this even though she used two plot elements – one of them to do with “The Hunting of the Snark”, the other a particular kind of club – that I’ve played around with myself in the past, without doing anything much with them. I felt she used them very cleverly. I feared she was going to come up with the familiar ploy of having the killer turn out to be someone the cop fancied. But her solution was neat and unexpected. Very good.

As for Oxford in real life, it was as enchanting as ever. Among the highlights was a trip to the revamped and deeply impressive Ashmolean Museum. The younger Edwardses are both due to face exams shortly. But the exams, however difficult they may prove to be, are a small price to pay for living such a privileged existence for three years. And thankfully there aren't so many murders there in real life as there are in fiction. 


(By the way, Blogger still isn't letting me upload photos - is anyone else suffering similarly?)