LONDON is the setting for three new crime dramas, if not the star. The sexiest building in the once-swaggering financial district, the Gherkin, featured in each of the opening episodes, but otherwise you cannot tell that the series share a location.
That may sound a good thing, suggesting the shows are strikingly individual, but two of them are going head-to-head on the same night, seemingly intent on out-goring each other with dismembered murder victims, heads and all. The revived Minder featuring the charmless Shane Richie is gruesome in a different way, and more of that later.
First, though, Whitechapel, which marked Rupert Penry-Jones' switch from BBC to ITV. Football's transfer window closed on Monday, and like many of those big-money, crowd-pleasing, slightly desperate purchases, RP-J was giving up a familiar position in a settled team – that of the Beeb's thinking woman's crumpet – and taking a bit of a gamble. Would ITV get what he was about? The first signs weren't good. In Spooks he only looked like he moisturised constantly. The producers of Whitechapel had him rubbing de-stress lotion into his temples every five minutes.
Penry-Jones is Joseph Chandler, a posh detective inspector being fast-tracked to a nice desk job at Met HQ, but first he must get his hands vaguely dirty in the East End and so is put in charge of a bunch of skiving slobs straight out of the Life On Mars incident room. For Chandler, even vaguely dirty hands are a big deal: he's got OCD and an obsession with cleanliness. "Haven't you lot heard of showers?" he flounced. "Get some self-discipline, some self-respect – and some deodorant."
ITV's OCD concerning blood 'n' guts is well known, but they may have excelled themselves with Whitechapel and the hunt for a modern-day Jack the Ripper who stabs, saws and slices in apparent homage to the original slayings. The first killing caused Chandler to throw up and it took all my powers of professional detachment – it's actually fairly easy for me to stay detached from ITV, but I'm building up my part – to keep my macaroon bar down.
The scruffbags, with the always excellent Phil Davis among them, didn't buy the Ripper theory until the second murder at the end of the opener. Now that they're backing the new boy, surely a plot device which isn't so much good cop-bad cop as prissy cop-smelly cop has little life left in it. There's always death, I suppose, and that could mean as many as nine more murders over the next two Mondays. Pass the sick bag…
Moses Jones started terrifically. London is so over-familiar as a telly location that a drama has a tough job casting it in a new, different, thrilling light, but the first half-hour succeeded in taking us somewhere else entirely. Possibly by stretching a discarded chip paper over the lens, it got London playing the role of 1970s New York with Shaun Parkes playing the role of Shaft, a seriously impressive dude of an undercover tec (the Moses Jones of the title) who's knocking down doors in the Big Smoke's Ugandan community to probe a body-in-a-suitcase murder seemingly involving witchcraft.
But after that I got bored. I don't really know why, though the problem may be Matt Smith. As Jones's sidekick, Smith's character Dan Twentyman is required by TV rules and regulations to be a bad fit. But he annoys Jones ("Are you going to keep doing that Famous Five-naive-idiot-savant stuff?") and he annoys me. He looks too young, which I guess is the idea here, but Smith will probably always appear young, a twentyman indeed. Nothing against the wee squirt; I'm one of the few who saw him and liked him in Party Animals. But Famous Five-naive-idiot-savant stuff may be his default position, in which case he's going to be perfect as the new Doctor Who.
Dennis Waterman has a cameo in Moses Jones, and of course he was a star of the original Minder way back when. Its disinterment cannot be entirely unconnected to the success of Life On Mars but, still, you wonder just how drunken the Five Christmas party must have been for the network to decide to go with Shane Richie, an actor who peaked with the Daz "Doorstep Challenge". Richie is Arthur Daley's nephew Archie, and in a scene-setter devoid of funny lines his performance consisted of merely pointing his pinstripe suit at the camera. Curiously, the streets of this "Lahndahn" also lacked presence: it was as if most of the budget had been spent on Richie and there was hardly any left over for extras.
The best bit about Lex Shrapnel as good-hearted Jamie (the Terry McCann character) is his name. If Lex Shrapnel is in the section of actors' register Spotlight devoted to those willing to turn out in caperish crime dramas at the drop of a bashed trilby, there must surely be a Derek Trigger as well.
The addictive Who Do You Think You Are? returned for a new run with the impressionist Rory Bremner squinting at a faded photograph of young master Roderick (his real name) posing in a kilt for the older girls at his Edinburgh school. Perhaps the showbiz career began then.
The urbane Bremner made a good subject, not least because mimics often don't know who they are, and this one struggled to get past first base by himself because his father was a remote figure, Bremner being kept in the dark about his war bravery and also the cancer which killed him. The leaves he managed to put on the family tree revealed more than one war hero neglectful of his children, and as Bremner is the age these men were when they took off, he resolved to try to be at home more with his wife and two daughters.
Respectful of history, Bremner didn't overdo the funny voices. Indeed, the best impression was delivered by his brother Nigel, who greeted him on the doorstep in his best Prince Charles: "Have you, mwmph, come far?"
