Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Hayley Atwell, Richard Coyle, Joel Beckett, Con O’Neill, Amanda Drew, Julian Lewis Jones, Ruth McCabe, Stephen McDade, Ray Pantthaki, Amaranthe Partridge.

Everywhere you go these days Hayley Atwell appears to be. The reason of course that she has been in some very high profile television programmes, films and even audio plays in the last couple of years and that all stems down from the fact that in every part she plays she is so believable and can hold the camera’s and audience’s attention unlike almost any other female actor working today, only Maggie Smith perhaps can have the same plaudits laid at her feet.

In the first part of Life of Crime, a programme set somewhere between Juliet Bravo and the magnificent Prime Suspect written by Lynda La Plante, the audience is introduced to W.P.C Denise Woods, Hayley Atwell, as she is part of a team that is investigating the death of a young woman who Woods had only met hours before whilst recovering in hospital from concussion. The programme goes along at a fair pace and sees the investigation beset with problems, not least in the misogynistic approach by her superior D.I. Ferguson, superbly portrayed by Con O’Neill, and Woods dogged determination to prove that the man who committed the crime could do it again.

Where the story line picked up dramatically was by showing that Woods was not adverse to tampering with evidence, a huge risk, completely unethical and immoral and a potential bomb waiting to go off, to trap the man they all knew was the murder. This is something new in looking at the life of a policewoman who will go through the ranks as the years go by. In what could have been an average programme, this twist coupled with Ms. Atwell’s, Con O’Neill’s and the emergence of the much missed Richard Coyle back to television made Life of Crime the stand out television programme on a Friday night.

Life of Crime returns next Friday.

Ian D. Hall