CRIMINAL ACTS

  TV and radio preview

by Robin Jarossi
Images © ITV plc

July 2010

 



 

 

Identity – ITV1

 

Identity ‘Identity’ is being heavily trailed by ITV1, and the fanfare is justified.

 

Chillling and topical, this six-parter stars Aidan Gillen and Keeley Hawes. They play detectives in an elite unit chasing identity thieves, those parasitic fraudsters who invade and devastate the lives of unsuspecting victims.

 

For writer and creator Ed Whitmore (‘Silent Witness’, ‘Waking the Dead’), the global techno-cancer of assumed identities, stolen credit and cyber stalking was too fertile a crime plague to ignore.

 

His opener kicks off with a gun siege. Curtis, a decorated former soldier, is barricaded in his house having shot a policeman. His marriage is in shreds, he has debts of £40,000. A Range Rover that Curtis ‘bought’ has been involved in the hit and run of a woman.

 

But did Curtis buy it? Or has his life been hijacked by a stranger who has spent Curtis’s money and destroyed his state of mind?

 

As DI Bloom, Aidan Gillen’s character, says, the thief ‘doesn’t want Curtis’s ID, he wants his soul’.

 

The problem for Bloom and co is that the thief who steals a person’s credit can spend his money without meeting anyone. The detectives are left chasing electronic footprints – parking fines, Oyster card journeys, credit card purchases – looking for someone who can be anyone they want.

 

There’s a modern twist on Sherlock Holmes’ gift for deduction here, with Holly Aird’s techie cop building profiles by trawling databases for personality traits – ‘Did I say he was a vegetarian?’

 

But geeky insights aside, ‘Identity’ grips because Ed Whitmore pumps up the drama. He’s created a powerfully edgy character in Bloom, a former undercover cop who’s already expert in assuming identities himself.

 

Gillen (after great turns in ‘Queer as Folk’ and ‘The Wire’) is again very watchable, this time as ‘damaged goods’, a clever but complex cop addicted to his own dangerous dual personality game.

 

Identity Elsewhere, Keeley Hawes (‘Ashes to Ashes’, ‘Mutual Friends’) as DSI Martha Lawson seems too glam and nice to have the heft to carve out her own specialist Scotland Yard unit, and much of the characterisation has the thinness often found in plot-driven drama.

 

But these are niggles. ‘Identity’ is fresh and dark, and drawn from a modern crime wave that seems out of control. Whitmore says, ‘I’ve done a ton of research. Once you start reading the real life cases you can’t stop. Probably the first story to really catch my attention was Elaine “The Chameleon” Parent, who employed numerology parlour tricks to obtain strangers’ birth certificates and passport numbers.

 

‘Eventually she killed a Florida bank clerk and flew to the UK under her name, but by utilising a dozen plus identities she managed to evade capture for another 12 years, when she shot herself. So out of all that came the idea of an elite Identity Unit who tackle the dark side of reinvention.”

 

People who badly want to be someone else are disturbing. Watch out.

 

Identity starts on ITV1 on Monday 5th July 9pm.

 

 

Justified – Five USA

 

An Elmore Leonard story has inspired a hidden gem of a new cop show currently tucked away on Five USA, little brother of channel Five.

 

‘Justified’ stars Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, whom Leonard fans encountered in ‘Fire in the Hole’, a longish short story from his 2002 collection ‘When the Women Come Out to Dance’.

 

Justified Before that, Raylan also appeared in Leonard’s novels ‘Pronto’ and ‘Riding the Rap’, but ‘Justified’ uses the short story as its launchpad.

 

Deputy marshal Givens bears some resemblance to McCloud, that other deputy marshal played by Dennis Weaver during the Seventies. He’s a cowboy in the modern world, wearing a Stetson (Leonard specifies the ‘Dallas Businessman Special’ on his weblog), cowboy boots and a hip holster. And he shoots to kill because that’s what a man’s gotta do.

 

Olyphant has faced off with Ian McShane in ‘Deadwood’ and Glenn Close in ‘Damages’, and he’s coolly macho enough to cut it as Leonard’s rule-busting hero here.

 

For the series, Raylan’s back story is that he was raised by his criminal father in the hills of Kentucky, and ran away to become a marshal and escape dad’s shadow. But after shooting a gun thug in Miami – a killing Raylan of course says was justified – he’s sent back to the one place he vowed never to see again, Kentucky.

 

‘Justified’ has been rounding up a loyal posse of followers, particularly Stateside, where it has created quite a media stir. It’s dry and gritty, has bruising confrontations with various psycho lowlifes, and features many of the characters from Leonard’s short story. There’s Givens’ dangerous old pal and fellow coal miner Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins – ‘The Shield’), Ava (Joelle Carter – ‘CSI: Miami’), the cheerleader from his youth that he always fancied, and Raylan’s boss, Art Mullen (Nick Searcy – ‘Runaway Jury’, ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’).

 

Justified FX, the network behind hits such as ‘The Shield’ and ‘Damages’, made ‘Justified’, and the producers and writers have conjured a vivid version of Leonard’s story, even lifting some of the dialogue. But then the author is also one of the show’s executive honchos, and no doubt influenced the choice of Olyphant’s hat, having felt the one forced on James LeGros in the TV movie of ‘Pronto’ looked like ‘it was ready to take off’.

 

Leonard’s brilliantly street-smart, sassy novels have fired dozens of terrific films – ‘Jackie Brown’, ‘3:10 to Yuma’, ‘Get Shorty’. ‘Justified’ is one of the few to get the small-screen series makeover, but it was worth the wait and packs far more punch than the forgotten versions of ‘Maximum Bob’ (1998, with Beau Bridges) or ‘Karen Sisco’ (2003, based on the ‘Out of Sight’ character).

 

Catch it on Five USA, Wednesdays 10pm. Season one’s big shootout is on Wednesday July 28th. And the good news is that Five USA has already bought season two. Yee-ha!

 

 

Over The Bill

 

After several failed revamps and fading ratings, ITV1’s former prime-time hit ‘The Bill’ is hanging up its blue helmets. A ‘gritty and poignant’ two-parter will end its 27-year run later this summer.

 

For me it was never better than in its twice-weekly half-hour slot from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s, when detectives such as Burnside and ‘Tosh’ Lines sorted out Sun Hill’s muggers and blaggers. US TV had guns and car chases, ‘The Bill’ offered plodding feet and hypochondriac PC Reg Hollis.

Last Day Of The Bill

Still it won a BAFTA and other awards, and boosted the careers of some decent actors – Keira Knightley, David Tennant, James McAvoy and Catherine Tate among them.

 

It was when ITV soapified the show in recent years that it lost the plot – and still more viewers. Veteran characters killed off, Sun Hill torched, a murderous WPC on the loose and demented theme music – offences for which, sadly, ‘The Bill’ really does deserve to be handcuffed and led away.

 

 

The Silence on BBC1

 

The murder of a policewoman witnessed by a deaf teenager is the premise of this thriller. Homicide detective Jim (Douglas Henshall) doesn’t know his 18-year-old niece, Amelia (Genevieve Barr), has witnessed the killing.

 

Traumatised, Amelia wants to retreat into her silent world, but realises she needs to tell her uncle what she saw. It’s a taut tale of police corruption and betrayal and has a good cast – Hugh Bonneville, Gina McKee, Dervla Kirwan.

 

BBC1’s movers and schedulers have dropped ‘The Silence’ into the week of the 10th-16th July without actually firming up its day and time. Eyes need to be peeled…

 

 

Lightning Strikes on Radio 4

 

In the annals of thriller plots, it is usually presidential assassinations, world domination and bids to clone Hitler that rock the best-seller lists.

 

Pig-napping doesn’t crop up much, but perhaps it is time to broaden your horizons.

 

PG Wodehouse is not the first name to loom when it comes to thriller writers, but children’s horror author RL Stine has cited Plum’s ‘Summer Lightning’ as an exemplar of the genre in a new anthology of essays called ‘Thrillers: 100 Must Reads’ (Oceanview Publishing and International Thriller Writers, Inc).

 

So who am I to quibble, particularly when R4 has a spiffing new dramatisation of the master’s 1929 novel on air this month.

 

Believe me, it’s worth stretching your genre-tolerance level for this tale of detection and pig abduction starring Matt Lucas, Patricia Hodge and Charles Dance. Brilliantly timed fisticuffs, imposturing, unsuitable chorus girls and broken engagements ensue.

 

Ernst Blofeld couldn’t provide more mayhem, and, if nothing else, this affable, polished production is a chance to assess whether RL Stine’s assertion of Wodehouse’s thriller cred gets your squeal of approval.

 

Part one is on R4 on Sunday 4th July at 3pm. Part 2 Sunday 11th.



 

 


 

Top of page

  Webmaster: Tony 'Grog' Roberts        [Contact]