Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: Tamzin Outhwaite, Dennis Waterman, Denis Lawson, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Niamh Cusack, Phil Davis, Jack Ellis, Tom Georgeson, Pinar Ogun, Jan Knightley, Adam Astill, Alan Bayer.
A bottle of wine or champagne, for those who pay scant regards to such things, somehow can drive a person to more obsessive behaviour, can cause a person to murder and be underhand more so perhaps that religion, politics and for the promise of love from a calculating, cold beauty could ever manage to be.
When the UCOS team are called in to look at the circumstances of a publican’s death in a fire, the last thing they may have expected was to be thrown into an emigration case, a study in the art of English wine appreciation and signing up for a five-a-side tournament in aid of supporting their local pub, but then when did that ever stop the likes of Gerry Standing from showing his French side of the family tree?
In Vino Veritas might not have been a season highlight for the team at UCOS, there seemed to be far too many strands, too many corks, to pull at to really get to grips with a semblance of a story, almost as if the writers and producers had somehow managed to appease three different writers and combining all their scripts into one big overall piece. It would have worked had New Tricks been a two hour detective drama, however the time constraints imposed on such a programme are such that it needed to lose something somewhere, it needed to lose an element of the story line in which to make it stand out as the series has so far managed.
It might not have been the best episode but it did contain two marvellous performances from guest stars Tom Georgeson and the superb Niamh Cusack. Tom Georgson never seems to get the recognition he deserves for his character acting and Niamh Cusack, as landlady Joanne Gibson, shone as she seems to always do whether on stage or on television with a bucket full of charm and ability.
With death on the cards, a murderer to catch and age to put aside on the football pitch, it seems that the house red is one to avoid, really only for the connoisseur.
Ian D. Hall