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‘It almost goes without saying that it’s period pitch-perfect’: Shaun Evans as Endeavour.
‘It almost goes without saying that it’s period pitch-perfect’: Shaun Evans as Endeavour. Photograph: ITV Plc
‘It almost goes without saying that it’s period pitch-perfect’: Shaun Evans as Endeavour. Photograph: ITV Plc

The week in TV: Endeavour, Shetland, Trapped and more

This article is more than 5 years old

A wondrous week for crime drama saw the return of young Morse, a final series of Shetland, and Iceland’s Trapped

Endeavour (ITV) | itv.com
Shetland (BBC One) | iPlayer
Trapped (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The Umbrella Academy (Netflix) | netflix.com
The Making of Me (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Storyville: Under the Wire (BBC Four) | iPlayer

An arm is washed ashore on a remote beach. A body is found lying below a pylon: flowers in her hair, and a white horse whinnies. A shambling man forcibly hugs his twin sister outside the Icelandic parliament, and sets them both gruesomely on fire. Welcome, then, to this year’s first splendid week of modern crime thrillers: there can have been few single weeks in which we have had such a quality surfeit. And, intriguingly, all on terrestrial, known by some who should know better than to patronise as “council telly”.

The one that might have been solved the most quickly will, of course, be spread and sprawled over our next few weeks, as will the landscape of Shetland. What amounts to, essentially, the one black man in that subarctic archipelago has been found dead. Had I been DI Jimmy Perez, I might at least have considered a call to Liam Neeson’s agent (too early for gags? Ah well)… but it’s another Highlander I’m first thinking of.

Young Johnny Kenton, who directed the opener of this (maybe last, must-be-hoped penultimate) season of Endeavour, did so with such style and perfect pacing – here languid, there threatening, here dappled, there red-blood pounding – as to astound. The discovery of the first body found in this episode, Pylon, was shot in such extraordinary fashion that it almost made you forget that the body was (of course, again) that of a young girl. Shaun Evans, Endeavour himself, who directs the second episode, has his work cut out. I grow to mildly resent those speaking nibbles of nonsense about “warm-bath television” – including ITV’s own doubtless esteemed head of studios, Kevin Lygo, who betrays in that quote a misunderstanding of a hefty jewel in the station’s crown, one of the knees of its bees.

I say “modern” thrillers, and with this I’m quite at peace: Endeavour still shows us how we came to current times via 1969 – the end, as Withnail and I had it, of “the greatest decade in the history of the world”, ha. It almost goes without saying that it’s period pitch-perfect: the boxy panda car, an 1100, back in the days when Austin could still somehow make cars; Led Zeppelin’s pulsing, disturbing What Is and What Should Never Be, although Endeavour, in disguise and in retreat, shackled in uniform, hiding from the mirror (from his own regrets) with an ill-judged moustache and boxed into run-down red brick, chooses also to let Led Zep slip him by: he’s mainlining Puccini.

I thought this first episode remarkable for its scene- and time-setting: less so, perhaps, the plot. Often Russell Lewis’s plotting can be ingenious: this time maybe less so (although it did give us the best line of the week, Fred Thursday’s “You’re not a man. You’re not the arse of a man”) – but still we will watch, because of the interplay between characters, which will never disappoint. As so often it’s the strength in depth of casting – the bone-dry Dr DeBryn, ever underwritten, got some tiny caustic lines; Fred’s wife, Win, looks set to come out of her beaten-down niceness newly forged in steel and misery. Bring it on home, I say. Well, there you go. Only seven tracks after What Is and What Should Never Be.

Douglas Henshall and the ‘donkey jacket of doom’ in Shetland. Photograph: Mark Mainz/BBC

No particularly witty, caustic lines in Shetland, just the soulful Dougie Henshall, again shrugging on what’s been nicely called his donkey jacket of doom, for another series: even though writer Ann Cleeves has chosen to discontinue the books, there’s happily no hint that the spin-off series itself need yet hit the cliff edge.

Trapped, a random find when first I found it three years ago, and a wonderful find too, returned with gusto, punch, and perhaps Iceland’s first act of terrorism. Throw in a smelting plant, in all that ice and fire, owned by a shell (Muslim) company, nice greenies objecting to earthquakes which might – just might – be brought about by fracking, nice cold farmers impoverished by globalisation, angry people who will always be angry at their essential lack of effect, or just inherent… lack… and the Icelandic government, whose prime minister knows all the police by name, suddenly has a crisis, herding cats. Fortunately they have big unselfish Andri, nicely reunited with old colleagues, scunnered by family issues, as chief cat-herder. Intelligent, glorious, and don’t watch it without gloves.

The Umbrella Academy: ‘wonderfully filmed but doesn’t quite hang together.’ Photograph: Christos Kalohoridis/Courtesy of Netflix

I wanted in this week’s review to love a new Netflix thing. The Umbrella Academy will divide critics. On one hand it’s a grand new take on every superhero franchise – the premise of five or perhaps seven superheroes, adopted at birth, brought up as siblings, reunited when dad dies, resenting each other, quietly hating – is certainly new. It’s wonderfully filmed, and very whizzy and gothic, and dark. On the other… it’s born of a graphic novel, and, as so often, doesn’t quite hang together unless you’ve actually possessed the patience to read the original. Despite the hype and amazing PR, no characters stand out, no stories stand out, and it’s a vanity project indulged by long pockets. Truly disliked it. I’ll expect hate mail. I refer you to the earlier “best line of the week”.

The Making of Me trod a kind path between the transgendered and those likely to be “triggered” by the transgendered. The first episode told three tales of anguish, and possible redemption. Those who get triggered, the red-faced and the whey, can have found nothing to object to in these first three tales of human beings doing brave dodgy surgery: instead it was a delight, in that it told not tales of surgery but of people, loved.

Under the Wire, a truly hard yet wonderful watch, told inter alia the story of Marie Colvin, famously shelled in Homs. But photographer Paul Conroy, whose story this essentially was, deserves glory, as much as Marie. Paul knew Marie well, a thousand times better than me. But I walked from Bajram-Curri, across the Albanian Alps, to Kosovo with her, and she accidentally saved my life. She was sharp, wise, caustically and shittily rude, wonderfully rude, arrogant, kind, loved good hotels and drinks and fags. There’s a film out now: it portrays her as slightly self-medicating for PTSD. And there are some articles worrying about Marie’s addiction to war, bad men. Oh, please. She just liked fags, and drink, and truth.

  • This article was amended on 26 February 2019. An earlier version incorrectly said that this would be the BBC’s last ever series of Shetland. While Ann Cleeves has confirmed she isn’t writing any more Shetland novels, the BBC has said that the adaptations starring Dougie Henshall are not necessarily coming to an end.

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