CHRISTOPHER STEVENS on TV: Gritty, ghoulish and gruesome – perfect for hardcore crime fans

Traces

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24 Hours In Police Custody: Black Widow

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You know that feeling when you need to pay for the parking meter, and you haven’t got any change? There’s a 2p piece in the car ashtray, a couple of 5p bits in your jeans pocket — shrapnel, my uncle used to call it.

When a pound coin turns up under the passenger seat, it’s like winning the Lottery.

That’s how it is at New Broadcasting House, as BBC execs search frantically for something to fill the schedules. Their Lottery win is Traces (BBC1), a crime drama with an exceptional cast, including Breaking Bad’s Laura Fraser as a police forensics investigator and Line Of Duty’s Martin Compston as . . . well, you’ll have to wait and see in tonight’s second episode.

Unless, that is, you watched Traces in 2019, when it screened on the Alibi channel. Alibi isn’t available on Freeview — it comes with a Sky or Virgin subscription, serving up repeats of cosy crime serials such as Father Brown and New Tricks.

Traces is the network’s first original commission, created to satisfy Alibi’s hardcore crime fans.

Based on an idea by the celebrated Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, and written by former Scott And Bailey star Amelia Bullmore, it’s steeped in investigator’s jargon.

Molly Windsor plays Emma, a trainee forensics officer horrified to discover that her online university course appears to be based on the real-life murder of her own mother. All the specifics match: a woman’s body found in a shallow grave on a Dundee hillside by a dog-walker.

Her professor (Laura Fraser) insists it’s a coincidence, as bodies are always turning up in shallow graves around Scotland.

Unconvinced, Emma starts asking questions — starting with her druggie father (John Gordon Sinclair) and her creepy stepdad.

It’s the sheer depth of detail that makes Traces absorbing, at least for the sort of viewer who is ghoulishly intrigued to learn that a barcode on a sticky label can still be legible, even after a blaze that destroys a building. The fire-blackened corpses are modelled with obsessive realism, too.

The realism of 24 Hours In Police Custody: Black Widow (C4) is so vividly presented that you could be forgiven for thinking it was scripted. This two-part observational documentary opens with a recording of a well-spoken woman conducting a job interview with a hired thug.

She’s thinking about having her ex-husband murdered, she says. How much would that cost?

Trying to sound cocky and offhand, the thug is vague about prices — ‘very, very, very expensive . . . ten to fifteen grand’ — but precise about the murder method. He would visit the man’s house, set his car on fire and, when the victim rushed outside, smash his head in with a brick.

Then he’d bundle the body in his car boot, drive it to a remote patch of woodland and dump it.

I assumed this conversation was a reconstruction, by actors. In fact, it was recorded by the woman’s jealous boyfriend, who left his phone on record in the house all day, hoping to trap her in an affair. What he heard instead shocked him so much that he went to the police.

Every stage of this inquiry was more sordid and surprising than the last.

Minutes after she was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, the ex-wife was rolling around on the floor of the interview room, feigning back pain.

Her unlucky former husband wasn’t even slightly shocked to be told she was plotting his death. It was all much stranger than fiction.