Television Roundup: Old bones, old tricks

Published on Friday 4 July 2008 19:42

Bonekickers Friday, BBC1, 9pm New Tricks Monday, BBC1, 9pm George Gently Sunday, BBC1, 8pm

THE TITLE IS GENIUS. HOW DO YOU make a show about archaeologists, who by definition spend most of their time ever-so-carefully scraping away with teeny scalpels, sound like action heroes? Why, give them a nonsensical name (wouldn't kicking the bones damage them?) which sounds a bit like "asskickers"! Even better, this Time Team have no beards, but are young, gorgeous and not just fiddling about with dusty old pottery shards. They're constantly falling over ancient mystical artefacts which conveniently are also being hotly sought by secret modern bad guys.

Bonekickers is absolutely shameless hokum, and I kind of love it. Its creators, Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah, showed in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes that they know how to do slick, populist entertainment which is fun enough to make you guiltily put your left-brain logic aside. And they've assembled an excellent cast to carry off some sharp dialogue.

Julie Graham, who has forged a career from playing the sexy other woman, takes and runs with the chance to play a lead, as the maverick archaeologist Dr Gillian Magwilde. Oh, of course she's a maverick – aren't they all? She's so unconventional that she doesn't always wait for the carbon dating analysis to come back before sinking another investigation trench. "But what if there's nothing down there?" asks someone who isn't such a maverick. "There's always something down there!" she snaps. "We have a medieval mystery to solve!"

Dr Gillian has a Gilderoy Lockhart-like rival, Professor Mastiff (winningly played by Michael Maloney), who has written a book called Sex Rites of the Ancients – "Soon to be a Channel Five series," he smarms. "I read your last one, Napoleon Goes A-Bonking," she retorts. Ooh, burn.

And she has a maverick team: Hugh Bonneville, the sarcastic, mildly alcoholic one, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the student who has to have everything explained to her on the audience's behalf, thereby seeming completely dopey, and Adrian Lester, who is there to look pretty and be supportive of Dr Gillian, which he does with his usual grace (probably thinking, "at least this is more realistic than Hustle").

Obviously sequences of people examining soil samples through microscopes would be thrilling enough, but just to keep things relevant, there's a whole subplot about a modern religious cult reviving the Crusades and attacking Muslims. This leads to one extremely violent scene and a ludicrously over-the-top action climax in which bones are kicked all over the place.

Anyone with any knowledge of archaeology will doubtless be cringing into their Theakston Old Peculiar at the liberties taken. But for the rest of us, this is delightful, highly watchable tosh.

New Tricks, however, returns with just ordinary tosh. Now on its fifth series, the premise is still the same: old cop guys solve crimes better than sassy modern cop gal, sort of as if Gene Hunt was brought to the present day, but a lot less fun. Or as Rose Tyler's mum from Doctor Who handily sums up: "You're old style, ain't ya – Old Bill. She's harder, newer, hard-arsed, always out to prove she's got bigger balls than any of you." Thanks Jackie, that gets everyone up to speed.

But the show seems as tired as its ex-retired 'tecs (James Bolam, Alun Armstrong and Dennis Waterman), with a dreary plot involving them having to testify in court and being shown up as idiots. Meanwhile, "hard-arsed" Amanda Redman toils away at a boring inheritance case. Perhaps it's time to give this show a carriage clock of its own.

Another old school copper returns in George Gently, following on from a decent pilot last year. Martin Shaw plays the mild-mannered mid-1960s inspector, but this is a far cry from Heartbeat: the grimy, unswinging Sixties of the North of England. The show was adapted from Alan Hunter's books by Peter Flannery, who brings a little of the flavour of his classic 1990s serial Our Friends in the North to it, and creates a convincing atmosphere.

But while Shaw and sidekick Lee Ingleby are good and the backdrop of the pre-Provisionals IRA is interesting, the mystery itself is fairly by-the-numbers. As a suspect, Pooky Quesnel is lumbered with a character as unlikely as her (apparently real) name. The drama could have done with a more subtle music score, too.

Still, with Gently's character being a by-the-book policeman, it's refreshing to see a screen tec who isn't a maverick in the slightest.