Luther Returns to BBC One

After a two-year gap, Luther returns to BBC One for a third series at the beginning of July. Devotees of Idris Elba's broody, enigmatic, rule-trampling 'tec may feel disgruntled that they're only going to get four episodes, but at least the great man is on stonking form.

Naturally your spoiler-free artsdesk can't give much of the game away, but this time the sometimes erratic Luther appears to have found its own natural tone, in which heightened realism and jump-out-of-your-seat grand guignol shocks sit comfortably with grimy east London locations. You get not one but a generous two killers to puzzle over (so far neither of them is Luther's female Moriarty, Alice Morgan), and it's fair to say that the past has returned to haunt the present.

Sienna Guillory is Luther's potential new girlfriend, while also aboard are such familiar faces as Warren Brown as Luther's trusty sidekick DS Ripley and Dermot Crowley as his fretful boss, Schenk. Nikka Amuka-Bird is back as DSI Erin Grey, but she's got it in for Luther and she has a menacing ally in George Stark (an ex-copper temporarily re-activated). You know he's horrible because he's played by David O'Hara (pictured below).  

And there are jokes too. "It's good to see some humour come to the surface," said Idris Elba at a screening of episode one this week, "because what we found when we were hanging with the real detectives in that world was that they have a massive sense of humour about it all. Otherwise they'd go mad. It also parallels what Luther is going through at the minute - he's sort of embraced a new haircut and a new life, and I guess laughing is part of it."

Luther's creator Neil Cross apparently once described Luther as "a feral Columbo and a bookish Dirty Harry fighting in a sack", which Elba can sort of relate to. "Both those characters were iconic in the way they were written. I was a big fan of Columbo especially, and the idea that Luther doesn't change his clothes was based around Columbo and that iconic mac, so yeah."

Director Sam Miller has amped up both the horror and the skittishness. "There's a playfulness at work in Neil's scripts where he dares to push the envelope, so you try to push it further and see where you can go," said Miller. "There's a quality to Luther where you almost feel he's lived all these horror stories somewhere in his mind, and the police work actually is quite minimal. It's like he just has to dream about the sequence and he starts to figure it out. That somehow allows the horror to be a little bit more graphic and a little bit more extreme at times, and more playful I'd say."

And after this? A Luther movie maybe? "Neil and I have talked about it at length," Elba acknowledges. "We haven't got to any deal stage or anything like that, but it's definitely a goal for us, yeah."

• Luther begins on BBC One at 9pm on 2 July