Television
Copping out
Marcus Berkmann
Aid still those crime dramas keep coming. A mere three have started in the past couple of weeks, with another half dozen due before Christmas, each more desperate than the last to impress us with its gritty realism and realistic grittiness. Watching them is a little like ploughing through one of those Kellogg's Variety Packs. Each of the cereals looks slightly different on the packet, but when you add milk and sugar they all taste much the same.
Liverpool 1 (ITV, Monday) is marginally the best of the current crop, set as it is amidst the scenic squalor of one of televi- sion's most over-used locations. Samantha Janus (here abbreviated to 'Sam' to emphasise her grit credentials) plays a Lon- don detective transferred to the Merseyside Vice Squad for reasons that were never made plain in episode one and had been completely forgotten by the end of episode two. Her co-workers resent her presence the words 'southern bastard' are never used but constantly implied — and her partner Cally (Mark Womack) treats her with ill- concealed contempt, which means that the two of them will be heaving away between the sheets by the end of episode five. Last week Cally was in trouble for apparently ejecting Mikey Sullivan from the 19th floor of a tower block in Everton. Which he didn't do, although he had thrown some- one else off a second-floor balcony only 45 minutes earlier. Cally is A Man Of Few Words, but fortunately everyone else makes up for him. Even Mikey, who was as thick as a breeze block, was able to provide a coherent description of his troubled men- tal state seconds before he leaped to his doom. In between all the usual deaths and maimings, the show effortlessly reinforces all our received notions of Liverpool: drugs, prostitution, Catholicism, family strife, not to mention the dreaded `scally' sense of humour. If you didn't laugh, you'd cry, as they always said in Bread. Although no one ever laughs here either.
Like so many of these series, Liverpool 1 is a small masterpiece of craft: it's well acted, beautifully shot and extravagantly well lit, with an unerring feel for landscape and location. But the basic format is terri- fyingly, almost hilariously derivative. Imag- ine Miami Vice rewritten by Jimmy McGovern and you would probably be the ITV executive who commissioned this bilge. Eight years ago, its creator Simon Burke was one of the two writers behind Chancer, one of the sharpest and most inventive ITV dramas of the decade. Such attributes would disqualify it from any place in today's ITV schedules. Liverpool 1, remarkably, is what now sells.
At least Burke's series has some craft and style to it. The Jump (ITV, Sunday) is just witless. Susan Vidler who plays the wife of a dodgy half-Greek businessman (Jonathan Cake) who is sent to jail on what appears to be a trumped-up charge. This means that he is bound to turn out guilty, but for the moment we are led to believe that he is innocent, and that his nasty brother (Andy Serkis, suspicious sideburns) is the real villain. As ever in such stories, the wife starts out sweet and unworldly and always believing the best of everyone, and by the second commercial break has mutat- ed into a ruthless businesswoman running rings around corrupt employees. Other, more famous actors scowl in the back- ground, waiting for their turn in the helter- skelter plot. It's all savagely unconvincing — Cake seems about as Greek as Brian Sewell — and you always know what any- one is going to say or do about three sec- onds before they do. But, again, look at the acting talent on offer: Sue Johnston, Adri- an Dunbar, Michael Angelis, as well as Vidler, who struggles heroically with dia- logue that wouldn't pass muster in Home and Away.
And still those crime dramas keep com- ing, wasting talent and screen time and oodles of money. In last week's episode of Lynda La Plante's risible Supply and Demand (ITV, Tuesday), it fell to that fine and sensitive actress Stella Gonet to speak the line we expect to hear in all such series sooner or later. 'Shut it,' said Stella, and whomever she was talking to did. If that's not enough to ensure a second series, I don't know what is.
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