TV Crime Log: Brown, Bletchley & Hostages

The first series of afternoon mysteries starring Mark Williams as GK Chesterton’s Father Brown did rather well for BBC1, banking a couple of million viewers, so it’s back again.

Once again, the second series is stripped across the next two weeks – every weekday at 2.15pm – with Mark Williams as the detective priest. In Chesterton’s stories, Brown’s parish was in London, but in this television version is set in the Cotswolds, likely because of the preponderance of French windows.

Look, the blurb for the entire week of Father Brown is going to take up too much valuable time, yours and mine, so let’s just agree we print Monday’s blurb and then, if you’re interested, you can go off in search of the rest. Yes? Good.

Father Brown is sceptical when a parishioner believes she’s being haunted by her sister who went missing years ago. However, when she herself vanishes, he must investigate both disappearances.

At Cudely Manor, Father Brown is startled by Charlotte McKinley, who wants an exorcism. Her sister Elspeth, who’s been missing for nine years, is not resting easy. Father Brown maintains that they don’t even know if Elspeth is dead and there’s no such thing as ghosts… as a chandelier drops and smashes where he was just standing.

The next night, Father Brown blesses the house with Charlotte’s husband Victor and daughter Selina in attendance. Afterwards, Elspeth’s portrait jumps off the wall and a distressed Victor flees the house, so Sid agrees to stay the night.

Later, Charlotte sits reading by the fire as Selina tries to frighten Sid in the hallway. The pair are spooked by a loud bang from the living room and run in to find it empty with the French windows locked. Charlotte has vanished into thin air…

These stand-alone mysteries work rather well in the afternoon. Gilbert Chesterton, after all, wrote a mighty 80 novels, but his intuitive detective only ever appeared in 51 short-stories.

There are more frocks in the new series of The Bletchley Circle tonight, about the former ladies of the wartime top-secret code-breaking HQ Bletchley Park – that’s them in that heavily-photoshopped image – who gather together to solve crimes.

It will take you barely a moment to decipher the blurb:

Set a year on from the first series in 1953, the ladies are reunited for their second case in the first two-part story when former Bletchley Park colleague, Alice Merren is accused of murder. Jean methodically sets to work examining the evidence and is intent on helping Alice after a distinguished scientist is discovered shot through the heart in the study of his home with Alice, gun in hand, standing over him.

The evidence is stacked against her, but Jean’s instincts tell her differently and she goes to visit Alice in Holloway Prison. Alice is quietly resigned to the fact she will hang.  But why has she offered no defence and why does she refuse to talk?

Jean calls on the ladies to reunite, but will they share her faith in Alice’s innocence?

The Bletchley Circle is on tonight at 9pm. It’s set in the 1950s, so there’s a good chance it’ll also feature French windows.

As far as I know, french windows are in short supply in Hostages, which begins on Saturday on Channel 4, but we live in hope.

Channel 4’s programme notes optimistically describe it as ‘Hostages Series 1.’ But the show has been bumping along the bottom of the US-ratings since it started – as a serialized drama it’s perhaps harder to dump midseason – so I wouldn’t hold your breath for another series.

Hostages is based on an Israeli format, like Homeland, so perhaps Channel 4 is hoping lightning will strike twice with that 9pm slot.  Good cast, though: Toni ‘Muriel’ Collette and Dylan McDermott.

Some advice, from me to you. Don’t form an emotional attachment with the blurb:

Dr Ellen Sanders, a top surgeon in Washington, DC, has been called upon to operate on the President of the United States… and then kill him.

Ellen is used to the pressures of her job and it’s her steady nature that has advanced her career and made her the first choice of the President. But when masked men invade the Sanders home the night before the operation and take Ellen, her husband and their two children hostage, threatening to harm them unless Ellen does as they ask, her calm demeanour is rocked to the core.

Her husband, hiding secrets of his own, is not much help, but Ellen will do anything to protect her family.

Duncan Carlisle, an FBI agent and hero at the centre of a conspiracy involving the President, feels the same way about his own loved-ones. As chief hostage-taker, Duncan will fight for his cause at any cost, even if it means putting another family at risk.

With her nearest and dearest in peril, Ellen faces a huge moral dilemma. As tensions mount and she fights for time while preparing for surgery, it becomes clear that the outwardly idyllic Sanders family isn’t as perfect as originally thought, nor are their captors as evil as one might expect.

Hannibal, Whicher, Blitz And Life: TV Crime Log

Gosh, start looking for the Record Button on your remote, because there’s tons of stuff on the telly this week.

Hannibal debuts on Sky Living tomorrow night, and is a procedural based on the relationship between Dr. Hannibal Lecter and criminal profiler Will Graham – working together to solve crime! – before Dr Lecter’s cannibal antics rather soured their friendship.

Thomas Harris fans will recognise Graham, played by Hugh Dancy, as the damaged FBI man responsible for Dr. Lecter’s incarceration in the novel Red Dragon. It’s an audacious attempt to kick life into a serial killer character who became a bit of a joke with his Young Hannibal Adventures, or whatever that last book and movie were called.

The aim, says series creator Bryan Fuller, is to explore the relationship between Lecter – played by the excellent Mads Mikkelsen – and Graham in the first three seasons, and then dramatise the events of Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs in two final seasons. A terrific idea, but Hannibal’s in the middle of its run on NBC, and despite decent reviews, recent ratings haven’t been hugely encouraging. Fuller is one of those showrunners whose shows – Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies – are well reviewed and pick-up devoted cult followings, but tend to get cancelled quickly.

Fuller has made changes which invest new life into familiar characters. Graham’s boss JackCrawford is there, as played by Laurence Fishburne, but irritating journalist Freddie Lounds is now a woman.

I shall be watching Sky Living tomorrow – that’s Tuesday at 10pm.

There’s another intriguing premise in Thursday night’s Murder On The Home Front, on ITV.

Yes, we’re in the Second World War again, right in the heart of the Blitz, but the concept behind this crime drama is to discover some of the secrets of the early days of forensic investigation.

Here’s some blurb that may enlighten you further:

‘When young women are found murdered DI Freddy Wilkins believes the obvious suspect is the vulnerable loner, Wilfred Ziegler as a result of the swastikas carved on the victims’ tongues. Dr Lennox Collins the passionate and brilliant Home Office Pathologist and Molly Cooper, his vivacious young secretary have their doubts and employ ground breaking forensic techniques to ensure the right man is brought to justice. However, Lennox soon learns that not only is he fighting a battle to modernise the way in which crimes are solved, but he’s also clashing with a government who will go to any lengths to ensure the country’s morale is sustained – even cover up a murder.’

Based on the memoirs of Molly Lefebure, secretary to the Home Office Pathologist Keith Simpson, Murder On The Home Front concludes next week. But if it’s a success, I’d imagine we’ll get more of the same.

Life Of Crime, which starts a three episode run on ITV on Friday night, follows three decades in the career of a policewoman in the Metropolitan Police. The aim is to show how the choices she makes as a rookie officer have explosive repercussions on her professional and personal life.

We first meet WPC Denise Woods in 1985, against the backdrop of the Brixton riots, then in 1997 in the second episode, and then in 2013 when she’s a senior office. Woods is played by Hayley Attwell, who also appeared in the movie version of The Sweeney and William Boyd’s spy romp, Reckless.

Life Of Crime is written by Declan Croghan, who penned some of the better episodes of Waking The Dead, and also Ripper Street. You can watch it on Friday night at 9pm – The Gentle Touch slot!

Cranking out the crime dramas like there’s no tomorrow, ITV has a sequel to The Suspicions of Mr Whicher on Sunday night.

The Murder In Angel Lane follows  19^th Century former Met Detective Jack Whicher as he launches on his career as a ‘private inquiry agent.’

Paddy Considine sports an impressive pair of sideburns as Whicher, who’s employed by Olivia Colman – dusting off her trademark bleak expression from Broadchurch.

This blurb will explain the plot better than I can:

When Whicher saves a respectable country lady from a violent robbery in a dangerous quarter of London, he learns that this woman, Susan Spencer is desperately hunting for her vulnerable young niece, Mary. Mary has come up to London in search of a young man, Stephen Gann who has made her pregnant.

Susan commissions Jack Whicher as a “private inquiry agent” to find her niece and the young man and Whicher is drawn irresistibly into a disturbing and puzzling murder case, which brings him up against wealthy and powerful figures and throws him into conflict with his former colleagues in the Metropolitan police.  The investigation leads to a private lunatic asylum where Whicher himself must confront the darkness of his own demons.

I do believe that ITV is smoothing its skirts and batting its eyelids at the possibility of another Whicher drama in the future. The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher is on ITV, Sunday night at 8pm.

Endeavour, ITV, Sunday

The roaring success of the Endeavour pilot last January – more than eight million people watched it – made the commissioning of a full-blown series of the Morse prequel something of an inevitability.

And the first of a four-part series starting Shaun Evans as the young Endeavour Morse is broadcast on Sunday night on ITV.

In the first, Morse’s investigation into a student’s death, apparently by heart attack, get him busted back to general police duties. Humiliated and sidelined, he’s forced to solve the case from the sidelines. I’m guessing that his enquiries will taken him into the gleaming spires of the city.

The pilot of Endeavour was pretty good, actually, and that last shot, of Evans looking into a car rear-view mirror and seeing John Thaw‘s eyes staring back as Barrington Phelong’s signature music began to play, sent a bit of a chill down the spine.

Endeavour, with its alienated young lead, promises to be an altogether darker beast than the other Morse spin-off, Lewis, and each of the four episodes have been written by creator Russell Lewis.

The pilot featured numerous other references to Morse including a Colin Dexter cameo, and the new series features other characters from the original series. Evans has big shoes to fill, of course, it was a good idea to partner him with Roger Allam – we like him – as DI Fred Thursday.

Endeavour is on ITV — anyone else keep wanting to call it ITV1? – at 9pm on Sunday night.