Line Of Duty
BBC1, Sunday
Too Close
ITV, Monday-Wednesday
Rating: 
Leonardo
Amazon
Rating: 
I was not, apparently, the only one to faff about playing and pausing and pausing and playing – too far, go back, now a millisecond forward – to freeze the final frame of this week’s Line Of Duty.
I thought I was. I thought I was the only one who was that clever, until a glance at social media revealed that the whole nation was pausing, rewinding, forwarding and freezing at a minute to 10pm last Sunday night.
We all had to know. Whose photo was shown in the file on Ted’s desk? Whose DNA matched Jo ‘expressionless voice’ Davidson’s on the police database? Did we find out?
I am fascinated by Jo ‘expressionless voice’ Davidson (Kelly Macdonald, above, with Vicky McClure) and those lingering looks she gives, which are known in our house as The Look
Goddamn it no, we did not. There was a photo of Davidson. The match was on the next page, which we didn’t see. We imagined we could outsmart Jed Mercurio, and our lesson of the week?
We can not outsmart Jed Mercurio. It may also help explain why he is a highly paid, highly successful TV writer and we are not.
After an underwhelming start, Line Of Duty is now sucking diesel, as someone is given to saying, but I can’t recall who. Mother of God, I wish I could. It’s event television again, and episode four was magnificent.
We all had to know. Whose photo was shown in the file on Ted’s desk (above)? Whose DNA matched Jo ‘expressionless voice’ Davidson’s on the police database? Did we find out?
We had balaclavas and an exciting set-piece shoot-out. (Poor Josie.) We had Buckells – aka ‘Shane Richie’ – being interrogated in the glass box. We had Ted being told he was about to be put out to pasture. (Poor Ted.)
We had the return of bent lawyer James Lakewell, a garrotting and Ryan Pilkington starting to show his hand and proving that all those locks on Jo ‘expressionless voice’ Davidson’s door were for nothing.
Waste of time, money and all that bolting.
Obviously, I am still quite confused. Does the Organised Crime Group actually do any organised crime? Does it have time, or is it always too busy corrupting coppers? Also, the young armed robbers from episode one, who obviously aren’t armed robbers – wouldn’t the investigation be moved on significantly if it were found out who organised that hit on the bookies?
Why haven’t they been questioned about that?
Plus, Kate. Will she ever be awarded some decent lines? But, mostly, I am fascinated by Jo ‘expressionless voice’ Davidson and those lingering looks she gives, which are known in our house as The Look.
This week she did The Look seven times, which is a record, and once from a bush outside Farida’s place, which, if this were a drinking game, would surely be a double shot.
But who is she related to on the database? Who? Tommy Hunter? That’s my bet.
Too Close, the latest stripped-through-theweek thriller, starred Emily Watson and Denise Gough, so that’s two reasons to watch right there. It’s like looking out of your window and seeing both a Maserati and a Ferrari parked in your drive.
But the material didn’t match them.
Watson played Emma, a forensic psychiatrist dispatched to Broadmoor (or similar) to assess Connie (Gough), who had driven her car into a river with two children strapped in the back, but had no memory of having done so.
Connie, at first meeting, was still cut up and badly bruised and looked horrifying, like some kind of sinister, partly plucked chicken. Connie had been a ‘yummy mummy’, with all the ‘yummy mummy’ accoutrements – the backstory was played out in flashbacks – so where had it all gone wrong?
Initially, she was pure Hannibal Lecter as she attempted to get under Emma’s skin, and the first episode was strong, but then it became soooooo slooooooow and petered out.
The male characters were all underwritten, some characters were left motiveless. Connie’s neighbour, Ness? What was her motive in this? And Emma’s confession to her husband at the end would surely have been revealed in any police investigation or at any inquest.
I failed to care about either of them and was, in fact, most interested in Connie’s brutish nurse and Connie’s ripostes (‘Off you go, fatty’). I was left with only the one thought: I hope Emma and ‘hubby Si’ disinfected their kitchen island.
Properly.
Leonardo, the drama series about the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci, stars Aidan Turner. And it did seem as if Poldark had somehow been transplanted to Italy in the 15th Century.
Not saying that Turner has only the one performance, but it was that performance here. Consequently, I could no more believe he was Leonardo than I can believe my cat is Joan Collins, even on the days she goes out in a wide-brimmed sun hat and designer shades.
Plus, the plotting is clichéd, a central character (played by Matilda De Angelis from The Undoing) is a fiction, the accents are all over the place – it felt like a dubbed Euro-mash-up – and this Leonardo is more idiot than genius.
There are eight episodes, but I didn’t make it beyond the first, which isn’t good. But I did do all four episodes of Intruder last week. What more do you want? Blood?