Why are the majority of UK crime shows so unbelievably crappy? The latest clucking turkey – Luther – waddled onto our screen on Tuesday evening. As it starred Idris Elba, the super-cool Stringer Bell from The Wire, I was looking forward to it.
It started with the eponymous police detective chasing what turned out to be a serial killer (now there’s a novelty!) through one of those disintegrating designer industrial constructions – lots of stairs and walkways and water and bits dropping off – to which TV producers are addicted. Cornered, the well-dressed psycho turns and runs down a precipitous walkway towards the giant detective – but he falls through a crumbly bit and is left dangling high in the air, hanging on by his fingertips (another novelty).
Luther extracts the whereabouts of the psycho’s latest victim, then lets him fall to his death.
Cut to Luther in his minimalist flat failing to play chess with a minimalist colleague. He is evidently “in a dark place” – not talking, not moving, staring moodily into the distance. (Not sure why – he solved the case and the bad man died.) Here’s a tip: unless a character has been through an utterly horrendous experience, on-screen unresponsiveness is extremely annoying. I know we’re meant to feel the character’s pain and complexity, but all we feel is bored.
We cut to a seemingly distressed woman phoning the police to report that she has found her parents shot dead in their country cottage. Their dog’s been shot too.
Luther is called back to work to deal with the case. (A board of inquiry has cleared him of responsibility for the death of the serial killer.) He has an eager new partner, even though he prefers working alone (is there no end to their inventiveness?.
Luther interviews the daughter, who is a genius academic prodigy with extravagantly flared lips. He immediately realizes that she is the killer because she doesn’t yawn when he yawns (lack of sympathy = conscienceless killer: mind you, given how boring the detective is, I’m surprised the interviewee hadn’t lapsed into a coma by this stage).
But they can’t find the gun she used at the crime scene.
Luther’s boss’s boss (a middle-aged white man, so he’s an idiot) tells Luther’s boss (a middle-aged white woman, so she’s great), “So he’s back. You doknow the man is nitroglycerine.” In real life he would probably have said, “You do know the man is a narcissistic dickhead.”
Luther takes time out to shout at his City lawyer wife when he discovers she is “seeing someone else”. He destroys a door to show just how upset he is. (When interrogating suspects, he is capable of asking questions like “Are you aware of Occam’s Razor?”, but becomes an inarticulate fifteen-year old hoodie outside the interrogation room. Yeah, likely.)
Then the psychopathic killer daughter grabs Luther’s wife in the street outside her office and messes with her head, while holding an ice-pick to her ear. The office is in the middle of the City, but there is not one single other person in the street to witness this outrage. I knew the banking crisis was bad – but this bad?
Then we see the parents’ dead dog being cremated. (The day after the killing? Why?) The whole audience shouts “The gun’s in the dog, you idiots!”
Turns out the gun was in the dog.
You can’t board a plane without some gormless security drone gawping at your tackle on a monitor, but who would bother examining a dog murdered by a deranged killer for clues? Not these morons, evidently.
At this stage, I’ll admit, I uttered a stream of expletives and turned over.
The people responsible for this drivel have evidently been watching some good American crime series (The Mentalist, Bones, CSI) and some rotten British ones (Waking the Dead, Silent Witness, anything recent by Lynda La Plante) and have unerringly identified and incorporated every defect, whilst carefully ignoring any strengths.
Why have Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes been so enjoyable? Because the cartoony characters are well-drawn and acted, and, crucially, the scripts are inventive and amusing: even relatively poor episodes provide several laugh-out-loud moments.
Now, Luther isn’t meant to be a rolling-in-the-aisles laugh-riot, but when a crime series script sounds as if it has been created by people whose only experience of detective work has been watching other TV crime series, you need an interesting, compelling central character, dialogue that sounds as if real people might actually speak it, and a few good laughs. Sprightly ensemble playing helps. And if the whole premise of the series is that – like Columbo – the detective knows who did it right from the off, the criminal needs to be interesting, believable, and a trifle scary.
Why the BBC would commission this witless dross is a mystery – certainly a greater mystery than anything you’ll find in Luther.
No comments:
Post a Comment