This article was originally published in The Courier on 1st March 2014.
Silk:
Monday, BBC One
Jonathan
Creek: Friday, BBC One
Paul
Whitelaw
The problem with idealistic QC Martha
Costello is that she's far too human and empathetic for her own good.
If only she could somehow dispense with her feelings and carry out
her job with the ruthless efficiency of a programmed assassin. Until
then, she's doomed to wrestle with ethical dilemmas on a weekly basis
at 9pm on BBC One.
That, in a nutshell, is the recurring
theme of Silk, the diverting legal drama that returned last
week for a third series. As played by Maxine Peake and written by
former barrister Peter Moffat, Martha is certainly one of the more
convincing lawyers to grace our screens. Her ability to balls things
up almost as often as she gets things right makes her infinitely more
sympathetic and believable than your standard maverick courtroom
hero. I'm no legal expert, but Moffat's work always carries a
persuasive ring of authenticity.
Her latest case was typical in that
it found her getting emotionally involved to the detriment of her
professional acumen. While the problem of a professional getting TOO
DAMN CLOSE to a case is a terrible genre cliché, Silk
tends to handle it with relative aplomb.
“There's too much mothering and
not enough lawyering,” frowned Clive, her Harrow/Oxford-educated paramour and colleague. You could hardly blame Martha
for embracing her maternal instincts while defending the son of her
own Head of Chambers. A vulnerable teenager with mental health
issues, he'd accidentally killed a policeman while taking part in a
protest march. What unfolded was a slickly executed rumination on
police brutality, corruption and the compromised values of insular
institutions.
Peake, who has a knack for delivering
dramatic courtroom speeches without ever overselling them, was as
solid and affecting as ever, while Neil Stuke, as morally ambiguous
chief clerk Billy, handled his terminal cancer sub-plot with
admirable restraint.
Although Silk is essentially a
case-of-the-week courtroom drama – and therefore fairly forgettable
in the grand scheme of things – it's realised with such skill that
it rarely fails to engage. Plus this week's episode treated us to the
sight of Peake dancing badly to Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us
Apart. Beat that, Law & Order: UK.
Despite its layers of black comedy,
whimsical mystery drama Jonathan Creek has always struck me as
rather too cosy for comfort. I admire David Renwick as a writer, but
I've never been taken with this particular creation. At its worst
it's little more than Midsomer Murders with a self-aware sense
of humour.
To give Renwick his due, the latest
episode did feature an enjoyably sly dig at the success of Sherlock,
an increasingly tricksy and self-regarding show that's usurped
Jonathan Creek in the nation's affections. Creek, competently
played as always by Alan Davies, was lumbered with an unwanted
sidekick: a young, cocky David Tennant lookalike who constantly
rattled off detailed yet entirely incorrect deductions a la Sherlock
on a bad day. But it was Creek, of course, who solved the case.
Even so, Renwick's attempts to spice
up the formula by showing us, a la Columbo, how the murder
happened in the first act felt half-baked. The inherent pleasure of
Columbo is in watching the faux-naive detective lure his
quarry into a trap. But Creek has none of that character's endearing
charm. He's just a dull middle-aged man solving crimes in his spare
time.
While the episode hung together more
coherently than some of the recent feature-length specials, tonally
it didn't quite gel. The story of a mentally ill mother hanging
herself after losing her baby and murdering an actress jarred rather
harshly against the jokes about Piers Morgan and unsubtle Alien
references. With the addition of a superfluous sub-plot involving Paula Wilcox and an urn of ashes, it all felt like something of a hodgepodge.
I was more entertained by the notion
that the moment where Creek was bitten by an angry theatre-goer was a
cheeky nod to the real-life incident in which Davies bit a homeless
man's ear. Do I deduce correctly?
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