It's a BBC drama special as John Byrne checks out the return of Ripper Street, the latest Agatha Christie adaptation and a new thriller as it reaches its conclusion.
Reviewed: Ripper Street (Friday, BBC One); Partners in Crime (Sunday, BBC One); The Interceptor (Wednesday, BBC One)
One of the great things about TV these days is that, every now and again, axed shows can be saved. Star Trek, of course, is the poster granddaddy of them all. But that was a rarity back in the 1960s, and remained so until recent years. Arrested Development, Futurama and Unforgettable are just three cancelled US shows that rose from the dead, but on this side of the Atlantic it's seldom to the point of extreme rarity, although the Bosco rumours are rife. As the radio ad for something else says: 'When it's gone, it's really gone'.
Over in the UK, the BBC has produced a few cracking shows that failed to survive, nearly always down to a toxic mix of low ratings and high costs. Zen, the quirky, Rome-based cop show starring Rufus Sewell, and 1950s' period drama The Hour, which featured Dominic West, were both high quality, smart productions and personal favourites. And doomed.
Another show that had much to admire was Ripper Street, which was cancelled by the Beeb after two seasons. Now revived by Amazon Prime Instant Video, season three was streamed in the UK from last November, on BBC America in January and, now, on BBC One in the UK.
Filmed largely in Dublin, the series is set in the Whitechapel area of London's East End, at the tail-end of the 19th Century – a time when the place was rife with crime and prostitution. Starring Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, and Adam Rothenberg as a crime-fighting trio of two London coppers and an American medic with a dubious past, it rattled along, got its hands dirty and looked fantastic.
So it was with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation that I sat down to watch the season three opener last Friday. A lot has changed, both in terms of the show's aesthetic and the lives of its key characters. Could the new owners deliver?
For starters, what we got was a slightly more cinematic feel, which gave it a less frantic pace than before. When Ripper Street was zippier, Macfayden's semi-comatose delivery stood out, but now it looks like his character Detective Inspector Edmund Reid could do with an injection of adrenaline. He certainly got it later in the episode.
Things have moved on four years from the season two finale and the trio no longer work together. Detective Sergeant Drake (Jerome Flynn) is in Manchester, while Captain Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) got the boot and is focusing more on debauchery.
Reid is withdrawn to obsess over the constabulary archive, but when a two-engine train crash occurs in Whitechapel and kills fifty-five civilians, the team are inadvertently reunited. A group of local criminals, aided by a physically and mentally scarred former railway employee, plotted to rob a train, which then led to the crash.
Well-crafted and subtly-plotted, Ripper Street made a strong return. At the end, relationships were just as prickly as before among the three amigos, which was a pleasantly unpleasant departure from the standard fare in procedurals, when such events are airbrushed and there's no residual badness between the main players. At this rate, and with seasons four and five already confirmed, this show is going nowhere but upwards.
Partners in Crime (Sunday, BBC One) is a new show that has taken the slot once reserved for Ripper Street, but whether this Agatha Christie-inspired period piece of snooty snooping will last five seasons is another matter.
After a pretty dismal opening episode, last Sunday's second showed a remarkable and much-needed improvement. Even by fluffy Sunday night TV standards, the plot's barely above Enid Blyton levels, the acting is pure pork, but at least this week the hour flew by with an entertaining romp that moved the story on substantially.
Last week's set-up saw a mysterious woman disappear from London-bound train in Paris, setting off a typical pair of Agatha Christie amateur sleuths. This time out, middle-class beekeeper Tommy Beresford, played with B-lister efficiency by David Walliams, was completely unconvincing when posing as a crook, while Jessica Raine, as Tommy's jolly wife Tuppence, fared better in a blonde wig while posing as a maid to an opera singer.
Between the daft plot and a ridiculous string of coincidences, this is pure Home Counties' Scooby-Doo and cannot be taken seriously if it's to be enjoyed. Pour yourself some tea and suspend reality, and this show will suit just fine for Sunday nights.
Just as ludicrous but, unfortunately, far less entertaining, was The Interceptor (Wednesday, BBC One), which ended its first and hopefully last season in a pretty unimpressive manner.
Okay, it's easy to kick a show when it's down, and if you begin to compare it to the Beeb's comedy output in recent years, The Interceptor starts looking good. The cast was fine, with O-T Fagbenle and Trevor Eve as the main protagonists, the former a righteous cop and the latter a nasty crook, but the whole run has been littered with lazy dialogue and thriller clichés.
In the finale, for example, the team were keeping an eye on an articulated lorry, with one cop reporting back to base. "Someone's getting out of the cab," he says. "It's the driver." Later, after a fellow cop is killed in an explosion, Fagbenle's character, angry cop Ash, says to his superior: "Are you telling me it's not personal now?" You wouldn't get away with that in 1975, never mind now. The BBC needs a drama script nazi.
Even the inevitable showdown between Ash and crime boss Roach was utterly unconvincing. And despite a cliff-hanger ending, I would put the house - okay, your house - on never seeing a second season of The Interceptor in the BBC listings. No loss though.
John Byrne
