Identity
– ITV1
‘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.
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’.
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’).
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.
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.
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