Review: The Jetty (BBC1): Crime drama goes for youth vote

There she is in The Jetty, in bed, but unable to sleep. Now, when you and I suffer from insomnia we end up looking a right mess. But the locks are still lustrous and perfectly arranged on the pillow, suggesting its owner never suffers from a bad hair day or indeed night.

Jenna Coleman is the star of this new policer. Nothing wrong with her acting, but is she too youthfully attractive for the role? She’s 38 but, with girlish dimples intact.

Her character DC Ember Manning has a running gag teasing her sidekick about being just a boy, and he doesn’t seem to have started shaving. “Oh my god you’re so young,” she laughs. Never mind, the chief super is bound to be a grizzled law-and-order veteran, yes? Actually she appears to be even younger than Manning.

So The Jetty is going after the youth vote – what else? There’s a watery setting that is almost becoming standard in cop shows. Broadchurch began the trend, then came Liar, The Pembrokeshire Murders and The Bay. These were followed by The Cove, The Inlet, The Babbling Brook and … all right, I made up a few of these but you get the, er, drift.

There’s a podcaster never far from the action and that’s very on trend, too. But, concerned with crimes against women, she’s no mere frippery in the Lancashire lakeside town, an insular community with grimness at odds with the natural beauty, and impervious to the ripple effect from #MeToo.

Amazed by the ease with which the old, unsolved case of a missing teenage girl seems to have been forgotten, the podcaster announces: “This place is like an A to Z of misogyny.” The case doesn’t start out causing Manning’s wakefulness, but after the discovery among the keepsakes of her deceased partner at the end of the opener, it surely will be from here until the end.

Our heroine, perhaps not directly part of the town’s problem, seems to have become inured to it. The episode opens with a suspicious fire at a boat hut. The sidekick quickly rules out half the town’s population, saying: “Women don’t tend to be arsonists.” Manning interjects: “It’s 2024, women can be anything they want to be.” Then, as the pair leave the scene, one of the numerous local cavemen shouts out “is it true you had your first f*** in the boat hut?” She replies: “Yeah, they put up a blue plaque.”

As you can tell, I had initial reservations about The Jetty. They’ve not been completely blown out of the water by the memory-box revelation, but consider me intrigued. Herself a teenage mother, Manning had been investigating how a young mum-to-be had fallen onto her car windscreen but now, so much more. What seemed to be little more than a star vehicle for Coleman is promising some hidden depths, though I think I might still prefer my crimebusters to be a bit older and a bit uglier.