A modest, well-adjusted detective, more plodding than the actual plod
Crime dramas on ITV, they're like buses – you wait for one ... you know how it goes. Three in four days by my count, all of which in some way resemble certain BBC shows. Well you get copycat crime, why not copycat crime drama? So the strange Murder on the Home Front on Thursday was a bit Waking the Dead and a bit Silent Witness but set in 1940, maybe to lure in a historical fiction/period drama/Call The Midwife audience as well. Then Life of Crime on Friday, about a female fed fighting her shouty misogynist colleagues (sexist pigs?) in the 80s to a soundtrack of Culture Club and Duran Duran, was basically Ashes to Ashes minus the sci-fi.
And now this – *The Suspicions of Mr Whicher* (ITV, Sunday) – all murky Victorian London streets, dodgy geezers with mutton chops drinking tankards of ale in dodgy inns, and horribly murdered young ladies ... it bears a passing resemblance to Bafta-nominated Ripper Street, no? Almost as if they thought: let's see what's doing well over there, and then have some of that over here.
But that would be unfair, especially on this one. Because back in 2011 there was an ITV adaptation of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or of the whodunnit at the heart of it (in the book the writer also turns detective herself, investigating the connection between the real-life Whicher and the fictional detectives he inspired: Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone). Now Neil McKay, who did that first adaptation, has taken (the real) Mr Whicher and written a new story – The Murder in Angel Lane – for him. Not only original then, but apt too. Because by marrying fact and fiction McKay is doing not only what Summerscale encourages, he's also following in the not undistinguished footsteps of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
No longer a copper, Whicher (Paddy Considine) meets and takes on the case of well-to-do Susan Spencer (woman of the moment Olivia Colman), who's in town looking for her missing 16-year-old niece. Actually not niece, the daughter of a cousin, she says, that's not a niece is it ... Well, anyway, she's really her daughter, it turns out, and she's dead, stabbed and left in the gloom on the cold cobbles of Angel Lane.
Colman doesn't really get to show her range, or her warmth (she doesn't even smile until right at the end). And Whicher isn't my absolute favourite detective – modest, self-effacing, meticulous, a good man certainly, but a bit of a bore, more plodding than the actual plod. You want a detective to have a bit of swagger or eccentricity about him, don't you? A drug habit, an ego at least? Or perhaps that's cliched, and this more realistic – Whicher is based on a real person, after all.
His way of working is certainly effective. He's methodical and thorough, digs up people's pasts as well as their graves, leaves no stone – or cobble – unturned, almost literally. And this is less about character and more about plot. Which twists and turns, goes up dead ends and down blind alleys. Almost too many: I sometimes got a bit lost in the Victorian gloom. Lost rather than swallowed up emotionally, which is what I've come to expect – and want – when Olivia Colman's involved. A little too long too, at two hours.
Richard Feynman – *The Fantastic Mr Feynman* (BBC2, Sunday) – was also a real detective of sorts. As a Nobel prize-winning physicist of course, also as the key component of the investigating commission into the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Nothing plodding about him though, he was a maverick. And a showman, entertainer, biologist, bongo player, painter, naturalist, poet, lover, lock-picker, mischief maker … oh and bomb-maker, though to be fair he did regret that.
Anyway, there's nothing boring about him. I could have easily watched two hours of this even if I only understand about 90% of quantum electrodynamics, if I'm honest. And even after the excellent BBC Challenger investigation drama the other day (all the real footage here reinforces how spot on William Hurt's performance was in that). Luckily Feynman, and his lectures, are all over the internet, where he continues to find new disciples 25 years after his death.
I love the fact that his father, as well as teaching young Richard to be interested in just about everything, also taught him how to disrespect, especially authority. Disrespect has come to be seen as a bad thing, by school kids and gang members and politicians who'd like to be school kids or gang members. Nonsense. Mr Feynman Snr knew; look what came from it. Take note fathers everywhere, teach your children the value of disrespect. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
Crime dramas on ITV, they're like buses – you wait for one ... you know how it goes. Three in four days by my count, all of which in some way resemble certain BBC shows. Well you get copycat crime, why not copycat crime drama? So the strange Murder on the Home Front on Thursday was a bit Waking the Dead and a bit Silent Witness but set in 1940, maybe to lure in a historical fiction/period drama/Call The Midwife audience as well. Then Life of Crime on Friday, about a female fed fighting her shouty misogynist colleagues (sexist pigs?) in the 80s to a soundtrack of Culture Club and Duran Duran, was basically Ashes to Ashes minus the sci-fi.
And now this – *The Suspicions of Mr Whicher* (ITV, Sunday) – all murky Victorian London streets, dodgy geezers with mutton chops drinking tankards of ale in dodgy inns, and horribly murdered young ladies ... it bears a passing resemblance to Bafta-nominated Ripper Street, no? Almost as if they thought: let's see what's doing well over there, and then have some of that over here.
But that would be unfair, especially on this one. Because back in 2011 there was an ITV adaptation of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or of the whodunnit at the heart of it (in the book the writer also turns detective herself, investigating the connection between the real-life Whicher and the fictional detectives he inspired: Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone). Now Neil McKay, who did that first adaptation, has taken (the real) Mr Whicher and written a new story – The Murder in Angel Lane – for him. Not only original then, but apt too. Because by marrying fact and fiction McKay is doing not only what Summerscale encourages, he's also following in the not undistinguished footsteps of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
No longer a copper, Whicher (Paddy Considine) meets and takes on the case of well-to-do Susan Spencer (woman of the moment Olivia Colman), who's in town looking for her missing 16-year-old niece. Actually not niece, the daughter of a cousin, she says, that's not a niece is it ... Well, anyway, she's really her daughter, it turns out, and she's dead, stabbed and left in the gloom on the cold cobbles of Angel Lane.
Colman doesn't really get to show her range, or her warmth (she doesn't even smile until right at the end). And Whicher isn't my absolute favourite detective – modest, self-effacing, meticulous, a good man certainly, but a bit of a bore, more plodding than the actual plod. You want a detective to have a bit of swagger or eccentricity about him, don't you? A drug habit, an ego at least? Or perhaps that's cliched, and this more realistic – Whicher is based on a real person, after all.
His way of working is certainly effective. He's methodical and thorough, digs up people's pasts as well as their graves, leaves no stone – or cobble – unturned, almost literally. And this is less about character and more about plot. Which twists and turns, goes up dead ends and down blind alleys. Almost too many: I sometimes got a bit lost in the Victorian gloom. Lost rather than swallowed up emotionally, which is what I've come to expect – and want – when Olivia Colman's involved. A little too long too, at two hours.
Richard Feynman – *The Fantastic Mr Feynman* (BBC2, Sunday) – was also a real detective of sorts. As a Nobel prize-winning physicist of course, also as the key component of the investigating commission into the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Nothing plodding about him though, he was a maverick. And a showman, entertainer, biologist, bongo player, painter, naturalist, poet, lover, lock-picker, mischief maker … oh and bomb-maker, though to be fair he did regret that.
Anyway, there's nothing boring about him. I could have easily watched two hours of this even if I only understand about 90% of quantum electrodynamics, if I'm honest. And even after the excellent BBC Challenger investigation drama the other day (all the real footage here reinforces how spot on William Hurt's performance was in that). Luckily Feynman, and his lectures, are all over the internet, where he continues to find new disciples 25 years after his death.
I love the fact that his father, as well as teaching young Richard to be interested in just about everything, also taught him how to disrespect, especially authority. Disrespect has come to be seen as a bad thing, by school kids and gang members and politicians who'd like to be school kids or gang members. Nonsense. Mr Feynman Snr knew; look what came from it. Take note fathers everywhere, teach your children the value of disrespect. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.