Revolutionary Rants

As many of you will know, I enjoy a murder mystery, and one featuring Robert Carlyle sounded even better. Sadly, this was not the case.

The last couple of nights we have tuned in to ITV to see one of their big autumn drama season (which have all, so far, been bloody dreadful - next week looks even worse, can you imagine the outcome of Ray ‘I’m a hard nut, me’ Winston and Suranne ‘weird name but I used to be in ‘Corrie’, me’ Jones in a whodunit called ‘Vincent’?! I dread to think) excited at the casting of Carlyle as a - wait for it - moody detective (instead of his usual moody psycho or stripper), but we were very much disappointed with the end result. Carlyle was good, in a limited role of looking moody and occasionally losing his blob, as was Daniel Mays in an even more limited role of eating and being nicer than Carlyle to people, but the whole thing was a convoluted (for no reason) pile of tosh!

Kids from the class of ‘76 are being killed off, but you don’t really care, you only get to meet two of them really; there are weird flashbacks to blue shoes over and over again, pertaining to be about the murder of one of the class in 1976; there is a missing boy called Aiden; a skinny doctor with a funny burn on her leg; superior officers telling Carlyle to get off the case; all the usual.

It wanted to be ‘Morse’ (the only good detective drama made by ITV - and anyone who saw the most recent ‘Frost’ will have to agree!) with a supernatural twist, but you guessed who had done it from the first half hour on (when the detective falls in love, you know you’ve got your murderer) and the twists were all, well, a bit naff, really.

Dreadful telly, come on ITV, stick to what you’re good at, crap soaps and vaguely amusing bits of fluff - leave the good stuff to the beeb and, even more, C4.