Trial and Retribution ITV1, 9pm Trial and Retribution? Tribulation and Retropulsion, more like. Not even Lynda La Plante's most devoted fans could claim that her dour old crime warhorse has ever moved forward with a smile on its craggy face.
Oddly, though, jollity and optimism broke out as DCS Mike Walker - played with seething intensity by David Hayman - left London for a wee hol in his auld hame toun, Glesca. This meant we were spared Mike's dead-eyed workmate Roisin Connor, a gloomy Hibernian harridan who somehow works the strange and terrible magic of being ice-cold, torn-faced and sex-mad.
Reluctantly drawn into an eight-year-old Glasgow missing-persons case that was going nowhere slowly, Mike divined a murder within two minutes of barking brusque but pointed inquiries at the chief suspect's stammering brother, the oily-handed owner of a back-street garage. Mike's instant success scunnered the underachieving Glasgow polis. Jings, if Mike were ever to move north full-time, the native plods would have to raise their game. Taggart, beware!
Mind you, Mike did encounter one local copper who deserves promotion. Give DI Jack Mullins his own show! He isn't actually a very good policeman, mind, being truculent and bullying rather than clever or diligent, but he sure sounds threateningly manly in the best old Clyde-built tradition.
Brilliantly growled by David O'Hara, "gravel-throated" isn't the term for Mullins. Mullins makes John Martyn sound like a schoolboy soprano. He rasps and grates like a heavy metal file inexpertly applied to the personal extremities of a frozen brass monkey. They can hear his ominous bass-baritone gurgling croak in the secure unit at Barlinnie, where it scares them. You could build a railroad train out of the catarrh clagging up his voice-box.
Mullins starts every day by gargling a bucket of red-hot shipyard rivets mixed with rot-gut whisky. Then he wolfs down porridge laced with shredded sheets of sandpaper before speed-smoking a mighty 10-snout wad of untipped Senior Service. Orrrrite, Mullins There was further joy to be had from idly looking around the grubby garage run by the chief suspect's stammering brother, oily-handed Ronnie Reid. For Ronnie Reid is a banger-racer, with his battered steed sitting outside and a fixture list for small-oval race events at the Highland Speedway stadium pinned to his wall. What's joyous about this? Because small-oval racing is four-wheeled motorsport's very apogee, and so it's good that we're all being reminded that the 2008 stock-car-racing season is about to begin.
While there isn't actually a Highland Speedway, there is the Cowdenbeath Racewall. It's at Central Park in the very heart of the town which constitutes the jewel in Fife's glittering tiara. March 8 is when the new Cowdenbeath season begins, with its first big banger crash-up scheduled for March 29.
Cowdenbeath: 6pm every Saturday night until November. Thrills! Spills! No-holds-barred conflict! Mangled Ford Sierras! The smell of burning rubber! And that's just beforehand, in the spectators' car park. Be there or be where the action ain't, suckers. But I digress.
Best of all, T&R at long last had some hope in it, in the pulchritudinous shape of Kerry Fox as DI Moyra Lynch.
First, she told Mike off for clicking his fingers at her, soon afterwards breaking into a smile. Then she laughed at him for pinging a rubber-band between his fingers in a bid to ease his cravings for nicotine. Between the pair, there was an air of easy familiarity which bodes well for T&R's future. Tecs and Romance? Hope so.
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