Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: David Tennant, Olivia Coleman, Andrew Buchan, Jodie Whittaker, Will Mellor, Arthur Darvill, David Bradley, Jonathon Bailey, Vicky McClure, Charlotte Beaumont, Joe Simms, Carolyn Pickles, Pauline Quirke.
The first line of enquiry is over for the detectives of Broadchurch. The man, the father of the murdered lad certainly had something to hide but it wasn’t the taking of his son’s life. It certainly would have been far too easy for Chris Chibnall to go down that route and have suspicion hang over Andrew Buchan’s character for the next few weeks.
The clues seem very far between in what has become the most gripping murder mystery of television for years. It isn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination to see why it has become so popular, it offers something far different from the usual crowd of detective programmes on offer; there is no easy answer in the drama. In the same way that Agatha Christie held readers spellbound from the moment she introduced her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair At Styles, Chris Chibnall’s Alec Hardy, portrayed by the superb David Tennant, is just as intriguing, as three dimensional and altogether human as other detectives that have found their way on television over the years, but like the great Inspector Morse, he is flawed and has a wardrobe full of secrets of his own that he keeping under wraps.
The overreaching urge to understand the characters, to get inside their heads in the way that Chris Chibnall has seemingly made it desirable to do so, is even more wonderfully intriguing than a straight forward who or rather why-done it. The fantastic Pauline Quirke has been slowly seething away in the background with what seems her own agenda. She has already lied to the police about the skateboard that is missing and now she seems hell bent on making all around her suffer under her withering looks. It is so rare to see Ms. Quirke play so one so complex and disturbing that it gives the audience chills just watching her unsettling.
Of course with any decent television detective drama, half the town will come under suspicion before the series is done and dusted and it will be the last person that anyone suspects when it is over, three episodes in and it is no clearer but it visibly the most disturbingly entertaining detective drama for years.
Broadchurch continues next Monday.
Ian D. Hall