Vigil - BBC TV review

When I was a small boy, I sat through innumerable episodes of an American TV series called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison. My Dad was a big fan of the show,  which was set on board an American nuclear submarine, but I was rather less enamoured. Suffice to say it was very different from Vigil, a thriller series written by Tom Edge. It's set on board a British nuclear sub and has just come to the end of its six-episode run on BBC TV.

Any series about nuclear submarines is almost certain to involve espionage as an ingredient, but Vigil scores right from the start as it concerns an investigation of a murder on board HMS Vigil, which occurs shortly after the mysterious capsizing of a fishing trawler. DCI Amy Silva (the talented and ubiquitous Suranne Jones) is the top cop sent on board to figure out who killed bolshy crew member Burke (Martin Compston). 

Amy suffers from claustrophobia, so sending her on to a submarine seems rather like an act of cruelty, despite her brilliance as a detective. But of course, in the finest tradition of Great Detectives, she goes for it. She has a complicated backstory, which emerges through a lengthy sequence of flashbacks. Her male partner drowned in a car accident for which she blames herself; she rescued his daughter from the car, but lost custody to the girl's grandparents. She then fell for a younger female cop, DS Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), but that relationship has run into difficulties. While Amy gets embroiled in a complex series of goings-on on board Vigil, Kirsten investigates the murder of Burke's anti-nuclear activist girlfriend Jade on dry land.

The Vigil's crew includes some familiar faces, notably Shaun Evans, better known to me as the young Morse in the highly enjoyable Endeavour (I've seen two episodes of the new series eight so far, and they are definitely up to standard). Suranne Jones and Rose Leslie are terrific, and so is Stephen Dillane, who plays a crafty rear-admiral who knows more about what is happening in the depths of the sea than he's prepared to admit. 

Vigil has proved very popular, but it's also received plenty of criticism, partly because of technical inaccuracies, partly because the final revelations were regarded by some as disappointing, and partly because of a perception of political bias. I enjoyed it with very few reservations (the main one being that the final fifteen minutes felt more like a conscientious soap opera than a thriller). Unlike all too many six-part series, it was packed with action and didn't outstay its welcome. Of course this means that some aspects were convoluted and over-the-top, but a story of this kind demands the suspension of disbelief and I was more than happy to suspend mine. 

The Secret of Crickley Hall - tv review (episode 3)

The Secret of Crickley Hall reached a suitably melodramatic climax this evening, as the third and final episode of the ghost story adapted from James Herbert's novel drew together the strands of its two story-lines, one from 1943, one contemporary. This has been a very popular show - yesterday a fellow writer whose judgment I respect was telling me how much she'd enjoyed it, and I've noted that my review of the first episode has already entered the list of the top ten most viewed of all the blog posts I've written. And since I've written over 1500 so far, that's quite something.

Much of the strength of the show came from the quality of the acting rather than the scariness of the story. When David Warner, playing (for once) a good guy, met his old adversary, played by Donald Sumpter, it was a pleasure to watch two highly accomplished veteran actors at work. Suranne Jones and Tom Ellis were good as the bereaved couple who made the mistake of taking a break from their ordinary lives at a place as sinister as Crickley Hall. And Douglas Henshall was such a nasty chap as the deranged Augustus Cribben that it will be fascinating to see how he copes with the very different role of Jimmy Perez in the forthcoming series based on Ann Cleeves' books, Shetland.

I wondered how the scriptwriter, Joe Ahearne, would manage to produce a "happy ending" suitable for the Sunday evening light entertainment slot without making the whole thing unacceptably twee. By and large, I think he managed to achieve the objective. That said, there were one or two elements that didn't quite work for me. For instance, the character of Cribben's dodgy sister wasn't clearly developed, and although there was an interesting glimpse of the (by now, very aged) sister in the present day that was pleasingly macabre, I'd have liked to know more about what she'd got up to since the 1940s.

I've read some very negative reviews of the show, including a rather witty if withering put-down of the early family scenes in episode one ("Alfred Hitchcock doing Outnumbered"). All the same, I'm glad I stayed with it. It doesn't bear comparison with, say, The Innocents, which is still definitely unsettling 50 years on, but it was well-fashioned light entertainment.

The Secret of Crickley Hall - review

The Secret of Crickley Hall, based on a book by James Herbert, began on BBC One this evening, and I thought I'd give it a go, even though I've never read a Herbert novel. That's largely because I tend to associate him with rather graphic horror, but press coverage of the show suggests that the book on which this adaptation (by Joe Ahearne) is based relies more on the suggestion of evil than its vivid portrayal. And this was borne out when I watched episode one.

The starting point of the story is the disappearance of a young boy from a play area when his mother (Suranne Jones, from Scott and Bailey) falls asleep. The loss of a child is one of the most heartbreaking experiences imaginable, and even in a fictional context needs to be handled with a degree of sensitivity, which on the whole I thought the script and cast managed to achieve. Eleven months later, the boy still hasn't been found and she is still in denial. Her husband (Tom Ellis) persuades her and their two daughters to move to the north for a couple of months, for a change of scene around the anniversary of the disappearance.

Given the circumstances, their choice for a getaway is very unwise indeed - a remote spot which rejoices in the name of Devil's Cleave. And they move in to a spooky old stone mansion for good measure! Even worse, it tuns out that one of the neighbours is played by the splendid David Warner, a veteran of so many scary movies that it will be a great plot twist if he turns out to be one of the good guys (he seems to be at present, but it's early days).

Needless to add, spooky things soon start to happen at the house, and there seem to be parallels with a mysterious sequence of events in the 1940s, when the house was a school for orphans run by a brother and sister with distinctly weird personalities and an undue fondness for enforcing strict discipline. The brother (Douglas Henshall) is called Augustus Cribben, which really speaks volumes...

It's very difficult with this sort of material to avoid cliche, and The Secret of Crickley Hall exuberantly embraced most of the conventions of the ghost story. I didn't think that was a problem for Sunday night light entertainment, and I enjoyed the show enough to want to keep watching next week.

Scott and Bailey - series review

Scott and Bailey has just finished what I suspect will be the first of a number of series. I'm glad I stuck with it, because it does offer something fresh in TV cop shows. It's not just that the three lead characters are all women cops - though the female slant to the story-line is key to its success. But the flavour of soap opera is never far away. And what that means is that although some things in the series are a bit irksome, at times it all makes for quite compelling viewing.

The demands of the story meant that Rachel, the brilliant but wayward young DC, behaved quite stupidly at times, while her older and wiser colleague wavered between staying with her nice but boring husband and going off with a more exciting yet rather dodgy colleague. While their boss,Jill Murray, was a bit manic at times.

Yet the quality of the acting by Suranne Jones, Lesley Sharp and Amelia Bullimore was very good, even better than the quality of the writing, which was certainly very capable. The plots weren't bad, either, and the odd implausibility was, I thought, definitely forgivable. After all, there are many classic crime stories with implausible elemeents. Overall, I really enjoyed the show and look forward to more in the future.

Scott & Bailey - review

Scott & Bailey is a brand-new ITV crime drama, following hot on the heels of Vera. As with Vera, the focus is on women detectives, but there are more differences than similarities – starting with the fact that this series is not based on novels: the scripts by Sally Wainwright are original to television. Each episode is half length of a Vera screenplay, the setting is urban (Manchester) rather than rural and the two lead characters are detective constables rather than more senior officers.

The first episode opens with a romantic dinner between DC Rachel Scott and her smooth but sleazy barrister boyfriend which turns into a disaster when he dumps her. Soon she and DC Janet Bailey are investigating the suspicious death of young pregnant Turkish woman – it is an apparent suicide which turns out to be murder.

Close parallels develop between the case and Rachel's disastrous relationship. Strangely enough, the plotting of the criminal investigation part of the story struck me as more credible than the fact that Rachel (potentially a very likeable character) would commit more than one crime herself in the course of extracting revenge on her ex. By the end, it wasn't easy to keep sympathy with her, which I can't imagine the writer intended.

The cast is good, with Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp as the title characters, and the excellent Amelia Bullimore as their boss. The writing is pacy, if at times uneven, and the Mancunian setting realistic although verging on the bleak. All in all, a reasonable start to a new series, and I'll probably watch it again next week.