Waking the Dead, BBC One/ Celebrity Naked Ambition, Channel 4

Last hurrah for Trevor Eve and his morbid squad of corpse-chasers

by Adam SweetingSunday, 13 March 2011

Nine lives: Trevor Eve returns to wake the dead for the final time

By the trail of dead shall ye know Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who bounces back irascibly for a ninth and final series of Waking the Dead. For once, British TV has the edge over its American counterpart. While Jerry Bruckheimer's US series, Cold Case, always feels dragged backwards by its clunking reconstructions of ancient crimes (especially the device of using young actors to impersonate now-elderly perps in their prime), Waking the Dead manages to catapult its back-catalogue felonies vividly into the present.

There was no milk of human kindness, just a continuous weepy discharge of misery and suffering

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