CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: DI Sunny returns with body up a chimney… and a callous new boss in Unforgotten
Unforgotten
Rating: *****
Coastal Defenders
Rating: ****
There it is, that haunting theme song. All We Do, by married pop duo Oh Wonder, is instantly evocative of ancient unsolved murders, throughout five series of Unforgotten (ITV1).
Before the pandemic, my local cafe had the CD on loop. Whenever I stopped for a coffee and a croissant (the fuel of armchair detectives everywhere) it was playing.
It gave me the uneasy sensation that a skeleton was under the patio terrace, and customers at all the tables were somehow connected to the crime. A vivid imagination is a curse.
It’s a curse that does not appear to afflict the show’s new star, DCI Jessie James (Sinead Keegan), who took one look at the latest set of bones and immediately announced that she had no interest in murders from more than 20 years ago.
Sinead Keenan as DCI Jessica James and Sanjeev Bhaskar as DI Sunny in Unforgotten
That threatened to put paid to the show’s whole concept. Worse, she told her deputy, DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar), that criminal investigations should not be treated as therapy for over-emotional policemen. Again, it’s as though she’s never watched Unforgotten.
Sunny was distraught over the death of his old boss, DCI Cassie Stuart, played by Nicola Walker. He spent hours sitting beside her grave. What he lacks is the callousness of his new guv’nor: when those bones were discovered, lodged up a chimney, she dubbed the victim ‘Dick van Dyke’s little brother’.
Mary Poppins she is not. Still, I’m worried about DCI Jessie James. If a character called Robert Ford appears, you can bet the ‘dirty little coward’ will shoot her down. (Readers who don’t know what this means are not watching enough black-and-white Westerns on the classic movie channels.)
No doubt she’ll be glad of a therapeutic cold case. As she packed her children off to school and grabbed some breakfast before her first day in her new office, her ‘gorgeous hubby’ Steve mentioned that he was having an affair and their marriage was over. Dirty little coward indeed.
Many fans of the show, including me, were hoping that DI Khan would be the new chief. He made it clear that he’d been asked, and had turned the job down — not fit, in his own eyes, to follow Cassie.
His regrets over that decision, and his seething dislike of Jessie, will be just two strands of this absorbingly complex drama. Other characters connected to the murder in ways that are not yet clear include a couple of junkies and an alcoholic businesswoman who beats her boyfriend.
‘Mary Poppins she is not. Still, I’m worried about DCI Jessie James’
As always, there are a couple of major names: Ian McElhinney and Hayley Mills, as lordly types in a manor house. How they are all tied together is far from clear, but there’s no one better than writer Chris Lang at controlling these multiple storylines.
Coastal Defenders (BBC2), about the work of commercial diving company SeaTech on the south coast, follows just a single story in each daily half-hour episode.
It opened with the repair work under a jetty at Brighton Marina, where houses and shops were starting to list alarmingly towards the water. Narrated by Line Of Duty’s Craig Parkinson, this was a fascinating look at dangerous work rarely seen on television. One diver, strapping himself into rubber body armour and a reinforced fishbowl helmet, described it as ‘putting on a life support system to go to work’.
The team were crawling under the jetty to bolster it with airbags. As they vacuumed silt away, the dredger became clogged. A discarded shirt was blocking the pipe. ‘As long as it’s not attached to a body,’ said supervisor Joe, ‘it’s fine.’
Whether they often dredge up bodies, we weren’t told. I’m worried now. It’s my vivid imagination.
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