ISN’T it great to see good drama back on TV?
I’ve always had the theory that they save all the proper stuff for winter because those wily programmers know we all have better things to do come the summer.
But I’m beginning to seriously consider whether some of those in TV land who decide what goes out when should take up a new career in a different kind of forecasting.
Instead of predicting what shows we’d like to see come summer or winter, some of them might turn out to have a nose for bad weather.
Who’d have thought it? Along comes a really powerful, beautifully acted drama like Broadchurch – swiftly followed by snow to keep us all glued to our chairs.
Not that I’d need that kind of incentive.
This is the nearest thing to the Scandinavian dramas which have kept me and millions of others entertained when the weather outside has been even gloomier than that on the screen.
ITV’s Broadchurch has a terrific line-up of actors from David Tennant and Olivia Colman as the seemingly mis-matched pair of detectives, to Huddersfield’s Jodie Whittaker doing a riveting job as the mother of a murdered boy and of course, the always watchable, David Bradley.
But where it also scores is in the pace of the piece, the way the scripts have created a village that we can recognise, a community where those you thought were friends might just turn out to be something else entirely.
The series’ opening sequences when the murdered boy’s father, a local plumber, strolls to work through the village’s main street greeting everyone he knows, says it all.
This is about loss. Of a life, of trust, of how you might feel if people you thought were friends turn out to be strangers.
Clever stuff. Roll on Mondays.
