Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Tazmin Merchant, Patrick Kennedy, James Fleet, Ryan Gage, John Bowe, Richard Bremmer, Amanda Fairbanks-Hynes, Emerald Fennell, Iain McKee, Siobhan Hayes, Susie Blake, John Heffernan, Patrick Knowles, Joey Batey.
Murder on the Home Front, the two-part television programme based on the memoirs of Molly Lefebure, may not have the stature of other crime/detective programmes that have become a staple of the diet, the fix of misdeed and felony that Britain seems to revel in watching but nonetheless it sparked and blossomed and in the end was enough to get the crime gastric juices flowing to make it quirky, watchable and in parts inspired.
As with any new crime drama the characters have to be believable, the audience has to care about the person solving the crime enough to want them to catch the felon and restore the balance of power between right and wrong for the show to be taken seriously. Some of the best loved investigators such as Quincy, Foyle, Morse and Columbo have all been taken to the public’s heart and in the same vein Patrick Kennedy’s home office pathologist Lennox Collins has the making of someone who could just be the right type of person to lead the next generation of crime solving enthusiasts into the genre.
Not everything was right though with the programme, to suggest otherwise would be an act of folly. To get a programme that involved forensic medicine during the dark and heavy days of World War Two and get the right type of characters to play parts which are essentially based on real people and a real event takes great casting and an element of luck to which bind them. That said, Ryan Gage was perfectly cast and enthralling as East-End gangster Danny Hastings, the ever engaging James Fleet as the stuck in the past Professor Stephens and the excellent John Bowe as the aging actor Ronald Terry were all on top form.
The sense of terror that the people who lived night after night in the terror of the blitz was nearly captured, aside from the lack of humanity that took refuge, and shown for what it was, a time of great mistrust in which anything could happen and not always at the hands of the German army.
Murder on the Home Front was an enjoyable programme but one that, if commissioned further, will have to get really under the skin of life in war-torn London and less clean, more gritty to make it avid viewing.
Ian D. Hall