Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Dougray Scott, Joanna Vanderham, Jamie Sives, Michael Abubaker, Gordon Kennedy, Angela Griffin, Ken Stott, Derek Riddell, Jonathan Kerrigan, Stuart Martin, Elle Haddington, Ewan Stewart, Laura Fraser, John Simm, Emma Hartley-Miller, Sarah McCardie, Alison McKenzie, Brian Bovell, Kim Chapman, Sorcha Groundsell, Paige Green, Ian Hanmore, Moyo Akendé, Bhav Joshi, Brian James Leys.
We demand that our police force be corruption free, that our detectives be without vice, that the thin blue line be rigid and unyielding, but never allowed to go beyond what is reasonable and defined by law in the pursuit of justice…
…We demand it, however, and not so much in secret; for we find ourselves siding with the ones who stretch the point, we need them to be dark, flawed, unhinged, just one step short of breaching the blue line as their drug and drink habit threatens the natural order between criminality and upright, moral, dull goodness.
Dixon of Dock Green is the man you need when you want a rational mind to have a presence on the street, but to get deep down and dirty and go head to head with the worst of society who murder and maim, who will seek the truth by not only shining a torch into the worst of broken crevices, but will crawl through needles and disgusting pictures that break the soul, we need detectives like DI Ray Lennox to offer us the belief that the crime will be solved, no matter what.
Irvine Welsh’s first series of Crime is brutal, an examination of the darker side of the city of Edinburgh, and one that perhaps fits the split personality of a place as much as the human being that was brought to life by Robert Louis Stevenson in Jekyll and Hyde, and in the hands of Dougray Scott, the good cop slowly finds himself overshadowed by the broken man as circumstances in his life threaten to overload the case that he has been chasing for over a decade.
With a cast that includes Jamie Sives, Ken Stott, Stuart Martin, Angela Griffin, and Joanna Vanderham, Crime is six-part drama that truly understands its obligation to the viewer; one that does not only ask to be thrust into the middle of the investigation, but to be placed within the mindset of the two opposing sides of right ad wrong.
Dougray Scott’s portrayal of Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is perhaps amongst the finest of his career, up there with his reading of Matt Busby in the drama United, and it is the grizzled life worn detective that he finds arguably his solace, the point to which all those wonderful parts he played before hand, has been leading up to.
The foil, the direction of his anger is taken up by the marvellous John Simm in the role of child killer Gareth Horsborough, and as the two look each other in the eye, what becomes unavoidable is the mirror, the one step over the blue line that could be taken as Lennox’s descent into narcotic relief threatens to rob him of his decency.
An excellent first series of Crime, and one that does prove that it does pay.
Ian D. Hall