Crime drama at its best not only offers a satisfying mystery and characters with whom we want to spend time, but a strong sense of place, a location that captures our imagination and makes us want to know more. Little wonder then that the BBC snapped up the rights to Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet of novels featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, the Scottish cop with the Spanish ancestor. With its authentic Shetland locations, Raven Black (the first of three two-part stories) was beautiful to look at.It's the middle of summer and nobody can sleep. It's making the locals crazyFrom the Read more ...

In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the tumbling hair, was rather good at narrowing his eyes and staring into space while we let our hot chocolate go cold waiting to discover not only who carried out one of those incredibly theatrical murders, but to see its baffling mechanism unpicked.And now he’s back for series five, doing rather nicely in marketing and with his days as a deviser of Read more ...

In between the second series of Silk and this new one, Peter Moffat took time out to write his rural-misery-and-cannon-fodder dirge, The Village. Having off-roaded so far from his usual track, perhaps it's no wonder that his return to the world of wigs, hypocrisy and legal sophistry felt a fraction off the pace.Last time we were loitering with intent around the nooks and corridors of Shoe Lane Chambers, we were sucked into a dystopian vortex of corruption and venality where just about everybody seemed to be compromised or on the take. Not least the legal system itself, with the noble Read more ...

You could boil down the content of this new HBO import to an info-bite that reads "two detectives hunt serial killer in Louisiana", but that wouldn't give you the faintest inkling of the pace, mood or texture of what's shaping up as a remarkable chunk of television. You may find it a little slow, and the Deep South accents sometimes cry out for explanatory surtitles, but you're liable to find it seeping into your consciousness like a troubling dream you can't shake off.Unusually for an American show, this eight-part series has been authored solely by its creator, Nic Pizzolatto, and is helmed Read more ...

Crikey. Line of Duty was pumping dangerous levels of octane first time round. For this new series we’re in for an overdose. After one hour the body count is racking up: 3 coppers (shot), 1 witness under protection (burned to a crisp), AN Other (defenestrated). Plus that lovely soft Keeley Hawes has been waterboarded in the lav and has assaulted a noisy neighbour with a wine bottle. If it’s cheering up you need, best retreat to Call the Midwife, where they have window latches you can trust.Series creator Jed Mercurio is proud to deliver a cop show that cops don’t have to watch with curled toes Read more ...

Mothers and their sons provided the framework for the latest story involving DCI Alan Banks, the character on whom ITV is pinning its hopes to fill the vacancy of the nation’s favourite detective now that Frost and Morse are no more. Peter Robinson’s series of novels has been enjoyed for more than 25 years, selling millions in the UK and translated into more than 20 languages, but it took until 2010 to reach our television screens with Stephen Tompkinson in the starring role.In "Wednesday’s Child", based on his 1992 book and the first of six episodes in series three, the focus was on a rough Read more ...

“I like it when you’re a bastard,” George Gently growled at his sidekick, halfway into the first episode of this sixth series set in 1960s Northumberland, reassuring us that the partnership is very much back on when all appeared to be lost the last time around. And what a terrific opener it proved to be.The cliffhanger for series five left the inspector (Martin Shaw) and his Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) at the hands of a gunman in Durham Cathedral. Both were shot – in Bacchus’s case emotionally shot too – and we picked them up a year later trying to resurrect their working Read more ...

A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...

Such is the level of confidence that the Silent Witness producers have in their new ensemble that star turn Emilia Fox barely lifted a scalpel in the latest instalment of the BBC’s long-running crime series. Either that or she needed a night or two off, and who could blame her? It's now in its 17th series, and Fox has stuck it out for more than half of them. And with four dead bodies to look at this week, it’s a high pressure job that you’re just bound to take home with you.So step forward the other lot: new guy Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern), research whiz Clarissa Mullery (Liz Carr Read more ...

It was Benjamin Franklin who said "money has never made man happy...the more of it one has the more one wants," and there is no shortage of examples of boundless greed and how an abundance of cash can upturn and empty lives. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, a former stockbroker convicted of fraud, The Wolf of Wall Street gives us one such example. This is Martin Scorsese's 23rd narrative feature and with it he proves that, at 71, he's inarguably still got it, with a flamboyantly immoral tale very much for and of our age, which is apparently the most effing foul-mouthed film in the Read more ...

As Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock reached the end of its latest brief span, Timeshift [****] surveyed the history of dramatic interpretations of Baker Street's finest with a wry eye, in a narrative sprinkled with nutritious facts and anecdotes. The account by Margaret Robinson from the Hammer Films art department of how she designed the latex horror mask for The Hound of the Baskervilles (the title role was played by a Great Dane called Colonel) was notably priceless.Aided by zesty interviews with Christopher Lee, Tim Pigott-Smith, PD James and more, and pinned together by an outrageously Read more ...

How come there is always a free parking space right outside the police station’s front door as Saga Norén draws up? If she has malodourous armpits, what must her manky leather trousers smell like? What does her partner in investigation Martin Rohde do to distract himself from her personal hygiene issues? Wouldn’t he do better to downsize his expensive car and use the money saved on renting an apartment rather than kipping in a hotel? All burning questions raised by the second series of the Danish-Swedish co-production The Bridge, currently being aired by BBC Four.It was the same with the Read more ...