ALL ABOUT EVE

Waking up screaming…

Being part of that easy-to-please schedulers’ demographic – TV fan with a pronounced crime bent – I’m normally fond of the BBC’s long-running Waking The Dead. Not a rabid follower by any means; I could happily skip an episode, even a whole series, without feeling any bracing urge to shell out on a DVD box set or submit myself to its charms on iPlayer. Yet on those nights of the week when boring old common sense suggests taking it a bit easy and wins (Sunday, Monday), a good crime or cop drama can suitably divert from the more mundane tasks real life throws up.

However, judging by last Sunday/Monday’s Magdalene 28 – the first two-parter of its eighth series – this flimsy loyalty looks set to be tested to the limit.

PLOT SPOILER

Here is its torturously implausible plot (roughly, so bear with me): An Irish girl brutally scarred by OTT psycho nun, Sister Margaret, escapes with lover, has unromantic tryst with keen young priest, leaves and decamps to Soho nightclub with lover. He is embroiled with Turkish gangster club owners, fight ensues, prime Turk and lover both die. Priest happens to wander past, rearranges critical evidence and saves girl’s skin. And that’s just the back-story! In the present a woman (the same girl?) is now a successful entrepreneur (and incidentally Mrs Trevor Eve, Sharon Maughan, formerly the Gold Blend lady) running naked down a country road. She has amnesia, after being apparently raped by three Turks (da!); her husband seemingly gutted halal style in their luxury abode. But there’s more… Much more. And it culminates in the girl not actually being the girl at all but her twin sister (identical in all ways except she doesn’t smoke). This confuses the viewer. It also confuses the priest, who’s back again, and not least the Turks who, through not fault of their own, re-kidnap the wrong twin and…

…And that’s just the half of it. It’s a plot with more ridiculous twists than Tanita Tikaram’s sobriety and with more gaping holes than Goliath’s colander, wasted on an episode that should clearly have been throttled to death before it left writer Declan Croghan’s computer. Which is a shame as in the face of its implacable odds the cast of WTD do a fine job.

WE ARE THE DEAD

Detective Spencer Jordan (Wil Johnson) is the most grounded, picking up the pieces from his cohorts and increasingly shouting abuse at suspects in the manner of his boss. Grace Foley (Shelia Grant – oops! – a recently remodelled Sue Johnston) is always decent if a little marginalised as the crew’s psychological profiler. Mind you it’s hard to come to the fore when you’re battling against Eve (Tara Fitzgerald), a one-woman pathologist colossus, who solves more forensic conundrums in the space of a manicured blink than real ones can do in a fortnight, and is the show’s resident tasty bit of posh to boot. Just to leaven the balance, a bit, we also learn she keeps a pet rat and is ergo a complete nutter.

But not as complete a nutter as Head of the Cold Case Unit, DSI Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve). Boyd is the angriest, rudest, mostly insanely aggressive TV cop of all time – a man so livid with everyone but himself you half expect him to self-combust at any moment. A man who lost his only son to hard drugs and hasn’t forgiven himself? Possibly. Or just a man who blames everyone single being and every inanimate object he comes into contact with for all his worldly woes in an unstoppable torrent of spittle-flecked rage. In short, he’s magnificent.

STEADY EDDIE

Like many my age, I can’t help but retain a great affection for Eve. This is undoubtedly to do with his first TV turn as Shoestring back in 1979/80. It may have only lasted for only two (fairly lengthy) series, but as the nervous computer expert turned laidback Bristol radio jock and full-on amateur sleuth Eve was implacable, the coolest cucumber on the televisual block.

If you can track down just one episode featuring Radio West’s ‘private ear’, make sure it’s the first series’ Find The Lady. This contained one-hour drama has a cast that not includes Christopher Biggins, Lynda Bellingham and the late, great Gary Holton, but also a star turn from a flame-haired Toyah Wilcox, post puppyfat prancing in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and in full Sheep Farming In Barnet performance mode. It rules.

Sadly, Eve gave up playing Eddie Shoestring in his prime to pursue a range of theatre roles and the show’s production team adapted the format to create the infinitely inferior Bergerac on the smug-a-bug’s tax-free haven of Jersey (an island with much deeper problems in real life). John Nettles couldn’t hold a candle to Eve in his prime – or right now, come to that – so it’s a crying shame an actor of Eve’s immense ability and stature was so badly short-changed at the start of this run of Waking The Dead. The only way, one prays to Sister Margaret, is up.