Eve’s Queens Love Veronica

There comes a stage in every television actor’s career when they’re asked to star in a detective series. It’s an immutable law of television that every actor, no matter how ill-suited to the role they may seem, can become a senior police officer on the grounds that we’ll never stop to think about just how this person made it through the ranks with their collection of bad habits. And for those of you who doubt me, I’d like to point out that the BBC will soon be launching a new series starring Alastair McGowan as an unconventional maverick detective. If there’s even a hint of an impression in that series, I may demand my licence fee back.

Which leads us to where the creators of Waking The Dead struck lucky in casting Trevor Eve as their star. Sure, they were slightly unconventional in casting Sue Johnstone (until then, probably best known for The Royle Family and Brookside) as his co-star, but there are all sorts of parallel TV universes where Waking The Dead was a star vehicle for someone completely unsuited for the role and it disappeared without trace along with the rest of the ‘Crime Doubles’ programmes it was launched with. After all, while it’s a slick and competent piece of television, there’s nothing that really sets it apart from other crime dramas. Even its trademark convoluted and occasionally nonsensical plots aren’t that much of a hallmark anymore, in a TV landscape where all the simple solutions were exhausted by Z-Cars sometime back in the 70s. That said, this week’s story was particularly bizarre, even by the usual Waking The Dead standards, with the person seemingly responsible for the Byzantine conspiracy to get a corrupt ex-cop out of prison looking confused when the truth was revealed. Sensibly, the programme ended without a ‘let’s all stand round in the office and explain it to each other’ scene which would have required some combination of Mamet and Kafka to do it full justice.

What makes it entirely watchable, though, is Eve’s performance as Boyd (one of the most shocking revelations this week was that he has a first name – Peter – and is not known simply by one word) and his almost familial relationship with the rest of the team. It’s possible to watch it and believe that rather than being some elite police team, they’re simply an eccentric family who live in a bizarrely lit and decorated bunker and solve old crimes in their spare time. Looked at this way, Eve becomes some sort of uber-Dad detective – charming and friendly one minute, disinterested, bored and on the verge of a mid-life crisis the next before bursting alive with manic energy when he gets the bit between his teeth and spots the bad guy, approximately 90 minutes after the audience at home have come to the usual conclusion that it’s normally the best-known guest star. I suspect one day, they’ll dispense with the other actors and just give Boyd his own series, in which he’s retired from the force and is running a tea shop in the Cotswolds, solving crimes in his spare time.

BBC One’s Love Soup is one of their big hopes for the autumn season and, you suspect, for several years into the future. However, as it comes from the pen of David Renwick, the creator of One Foot In The Grave and Jonathan Creek, planning on having it as an annual series would be a triumph of hope over expectation. This was Renwick’s take on the romantic comedy, from his usual absurdist perspective. Here, the catch is that our hero and heroine are supposedly perfect for each other, but never meet, with their two lives carrying on in parallel, unbeknownst to each other. It’s an interesting concept, though one wonders how long it can be pushed until it breaks, but the main problem with it is that if you’re running two stories next to each other, it’s not good to have one much more interesting than the other, which is where Love Soup fell down, with the male side of the story (screenwriter Gil, deals with strange neighbours, the consequences of off-the-cuff comments and a date whose cat has just died) seeming much more balanced and engaging than the wild rollercoaster of the female half which, veered from the banal to the downright weird, with a sequence that felt more like the basis for a Jonathan Creek episode than a romantic comedy.

Of course, in years gone by, the start of autumn would have been heralded by the BBC launching a big new costume drama, but Channel 4 got there first this year, bringing us Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, the latest attempt in her ongoing war with Judi Dench to play the most Queens in their career. Mirren will equalize with Elizabeth II later this year, but both have been spotted hanging round scriptwriters and commissioning editors talking about how interesting Queen Anne was. Back to the programme, though, which had all the trappings of a proper BBC-style costume drama – big sets, lots of stars (Jeremy Irons, Ian McDiarmid, Patrick Malahide) and history teachers around the country breathing a sigh of relief as it stayed just about accurate enough to history to fill a whole week of lessons. The trouble was, it just didn’t do anything special or interesting with a story that’s been covered hundreds of times before, with events following on from each other in familiar sequence. It’s quite clear that the Tudors and Stuarts are the big names in non-Shakespearean monarchical drama (last year we had Ray Winstone as Henry VIII and Rupert Graves as Charles II, with Anne-Marie Duff as a younger Elizabeth still to come this year) but surely there’s scope for looking at some of the lesser-known names of those dynasties, just to give us a story we’re not familiar with? Wouldn’t the journey from virtually nothing to absolute power experienced by Henry VII or William Of Orange make good drama, or do both of those stories, which rely heavily on someone usurping the throne, ask too many questions about the supposedly sedate progress of the British system?

Across the Atlantic, last year’s best new TV series returned this week. It’s a show based around a central mystery, featuring a range of characters whose motivations are often revealed in flashback and set in a place seemingly divorced from reality – but it’s not called Lost and it actually answers the questions it poses. On the surface, UPN’s Veronica Mars, is just another clone from the Buffy template, featuring a blonde in High School who’s also a part-time private detective trying to find out who killed her best friend, but it takes it style from an older Californian story, the film noir private eye of Chandler or Chinatown investigating the sleazy underpinnings of the town of Neptune where ‘your parents are either millionaires, or they work for millionaires.’ The new series wrapped up the few threads that had hung over the summer, then kicked off a whole new mystery in the dying moments of the first episode with a rather shocking ending, But we can leave discussing that for another day, as my main purpose today is to tell you that the first series is finally appearing on British TV, so if you have Living TV and are able to watch it at 6pm tomorrow (Monday), don’t miss it. And if my recommendation alone isn’t enough, maybe the fact that Kevin Smith and Buffy creator Joss Whedon are both such fans of the series that they’re making guest appearances in it will do the trick.

Finally, things I didn’t watch on ITV this week included their new family comedy-drama All About George. Though I’m not sure ITV expected anyone to watch it given that it was thrown into the Thursday night battleground between Spooks and Elizabeth I. That it somehow got more viewers than either of them tells me something about the tastes of the British viewing public that isn’t pretty.