“There is nothing new under the sun,” says Ecclesiastes (1:9), but that clearly isn’t true because only yesterday I bought a brand new dustpan and brush set (new year resolution: live the dream). But if I were a writer trying to get an original TV drama commissioned it would feel like it was true. Because the old stuff just keeps on being recycled and given another shuffle round the paddock.
This week we saw yet another “reboot” — of a 25-year-old police drama, namely The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, although modernity’s love of a one-word title requires that it’s now called Lynley. We can add it to the tall pile of revivals that includes the resuscitated Van der Valk (formerly played by Barry Foster, then Marc Warren), Dalgliesh (formerly played by Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw, latterly by Bertie Carvel) and Bergerac (formerly John Nettles, now Damien Molony). And that’s just the police shows. Take The Forsytes, aka The Forsyte Saga, which has just had its third iteration, this time on Channel 5.
Is there an imagination deficit among TV commissioners? Is it laziness? Possibly, but it is probably mostly about money. Old series are a safe bet and involve less risk because they offer a baked-in, ready-made audience who don’t need convincing, the familiar material tickling their nostalgia spots.
Is the new Lynley any good? Well, it’s perfectly fine, conventional and does the job, but in the way a Boots meal deal is fine, conventional and does the job. You are unlikely to run through the streets shouting about it.
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The plot of episode one was barking mad and involved the murder of a rich banker who thought he was Emperor Augustus on his little island off the East Anglian coast. This was a ruse for him to have bacchanalian sex parties and be a dirty old man having sex with younger women, including his own daughter-in-law, and filming it on his perv-cam. And all while his wife lay in bed dying of cancer. Nice.
This time the parts of Lynley, the posho Oxbridge detective inspector, and Barbara Havers, the working-class detective sergeant, are filled by Leo Suter and Sofia Barclay. They do have a chemistry of sorts, although whether it will be as strong as that of Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small, who previously played the characters, remains to be seen. Incidentally, all six of the original series are available on iPlayer. I watched the first episode out of interest — and what a cast. Bill Nighy, John Sessions and a 19-year-old Henry Cavill.
The arrival of Lynley follows the path of the resuscitated Dalgliesh — now in its third iteration and played with cerebral gravity by Bertie Carvel
PA
Barclay’s Havers seems more eye-rollingly sulky and chippy than Small’s sweeter, socially unsure version. When teamed up with her new boss she snarked that she would have to “nurse-maid some fresh-faced posh City boy who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow”, a remark that — what were the chances? — he overheard. Before long she was accusing him of not wanting to arrest a bluestocking out of social bias: “Do you think posh people don’t commit murders, that it’s just the plebs?” “Do you want a hand brushing that chip off your shoulder?” he replied. We are not in subtle waters here. “We’re big in iron and steel,” Havers said of her family. “My mother irons and my dad steals”.
• Lynley star Leo Suter — ‘would I play Bond? Watch this space’
But Suter’s Lynley does have a definite suaveness — the character has a swish house with a kitchen island, for heaven’s sake — and the way Havers gradually warms to Lynley in subsequent episodes is well done. I do have to tell you, though, that many of the standard cop show clichés abound. Odd-couple police duo who start off prickly but learn to love each other? Tick. Educated detective who says things like “pax vobiscum” to his baffled, less cultured senior (Daniel Mays)? Tick. Detective who says: “We’ll need a post mortem” upon finding a murder victim’s body (No! You don’t say, inspector)? Tick. Officers opening suspects’ laptops and getting instant access with no passwords required? Tick. The sentence “The press will have a field day”? Tick. At least this detective hasn’t got a drinking problem, but give it time.
It is a brave sitcom that shows us, within the first two minutes, a local weirdo who has just put a petrol pump up his bottom. And this is one of the less farcical things in Can You Keep a Secret? Dawn French stars as Debbie, a middle-aged woman living in a chocolate-box cottage who fakes the death of her drippy husband, William (Mark Heap), to claim £250,000 life insurance.
Dawn French stars as an unlikely protagonist in Can You Keep A Secret?, a sitcom that finds surprising warmth in a life insurance scam
BBC/BIG TALK STUDIOS/ALISTAIR HEAP
You’ll have spotted the problem. French is a “national treasure”, but insurance fraudsters who fake death, making everyone else’s premiums rise, make unsympathetic protagonists. Ask John Darwin, the Canoe Man. So they get round it by making the insurers the baddies: when William was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, they announced that he wasn’t covered. Which I suspect will resonate with a lot of people. Debbie says they have been model citizens all their lives, paid their dues and their insurance premiums, and find “the game is rigged”. It neatly makes Debbie a sort of grey-haired Robin Hood, especially when she starts giving away money.
• Can You Keep a Secret? review — Dawn French farce is a surprising treat
Does it work? Well, yes actually. True, there are some duff lines, but the funny ones more than outweigh them, resulting in a feelgood dark comedy that is surprisingly uplifting. French’s comic timing is reliably sharp and the premise that William is hiding upstairs pretending to be dead while his wife plays the grieving widow isn’t preposterous because that’s exactly what John Darwin did in real life. However, the useful idiots in the village who unknowingly facilitate the fraud stretch credulity, such as the bungling GP who is so germ obsessed she hates touching patients and declares William dead when really he’s just taken too many Parkinson’s pills. And the bungling funeral director is a funny character, but the way that he “lost the paperwork” for one chap’s body so he was cremated as William without anyone noticing doesn’t really add up. But who cares? It’s a comedy. And goodness knows we need more of those.
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