Review: Criminal Record (AppleTV+) as Peter Capaldi brings menace to familiar detective show

There’s a much-used meme of a pensioner vox-popped by a reporter in the street. He’s telling her there’s to be an election, but it could just as easily be the fact TV has churned out a crime drama. “You’re joking,” she shrieks. “What, another one?”

Ah, but Criminal Report has Peter Capaldi in it and he doesn’t normally do policers. Indeed, he’s never played a detective before. And there’s an evocative scene early in this eight-parter where he’s sat at outside a Turkish cafe, the other customers sooking on their nargiles, and our man is nonchalantly surveying the street life – a punch-up in a doorway and, in a window above, a couple dancing the tango.

Criminal Report is London-set. What, another one? And it’s about the police probing potential corruption within the ranks. What, another one?

But Paul Ritman’s thriller isn’t a rip-off of Line of Duty. Det Sgt June Lenker (Cush Jumbo) doesn’t have official clearance to go after Capaldi’s DCI, Dan Hegarty. But he’s messing with her head and, it seems, her murder investigation. At the end of episode two, she says: “He thinks he’s knocked me down so hard I won’t get back up again. No, not me.”

Peter Capaldi in Criminal Record. What's he hiding?

So Criminal Report is a cop not just battling crime, but superiors who won’t listen to her and her fears about wrongful conviction, deferring to the more experienced officer? What, another one? Yes, but the force being impersonated here is the Met and with it having so many issues with racism and sexism, young, black woman versus old, white man assumes ripped-from-headlines relevancy.

We first meet Hegarty as he moonlights as security detail at a swish party, presumably to top up the pension pot.

He’s seen it all as a crimebuster and blithely recounts an incident for the grim amusement of guests in the back of his car about the victim of housebreaking left bound and gagged one Christmas Eve. No neighbour, in the spirit of the season, knocked on the poor fellow’s door. That’s London for you, I suppose.

While Hegarty, who Capaldi plays as Scots with a menacing Capstan Full Strength growl, is nearing the end of his career, Lenker is desperate to progress hers.

“Do I come over as aggressive?” she asks her partner, a psychiatrist. “Am I antsy, shouty, arsey, crazy?” Well, she’s dogged for sure. And brave, as she proves when charging into a lift before it shuts, trapping her with the man – white – she thinks escaped a murder charge back in 2011 while a friend from school – black – was jailed for 24 years.

Criminal Record is a classy production, making the familiar setting seem exotically different. And the familiar premise is made thrilling by Jumbo’s jousts with Capaldi, whose character will start out mindful of the need not to patronise his junior colleague, especially in such tense times for the Met.

But he only ends up sneering: “Tell me, are you familiar with the term ‘unconscious bias’? I did the away-day for my sins, I got the badge. All very, very … instructive.”

What, another crime drama? This one’s terrific.