TV review: The Fall | Frankie | Rock’n’Roll Britannia

WHEN I found out the new drama The Fall wasn’t, after all, the story of a chaotic rock band with almost 50 ex-members and one constant – incorrigible, irascible Mark E Smith – I was disappointed. But the feeling didn’t last, because this is a psychological thriller and a good one, maybe the best since The Shadow Line.

The Fall

BBC2, Monday, 9pm

Frankie

BBC1, Tuesday, 9pm

Rock’n’Roll Britannia

BBC4, Friday, 9pm

“Psychological thriller” is lazy, shorthand TV buzz-speak of a faintly desperate kind. I’m sure that Snog Marry Avoid?, the horseracing on Channel 4 and Scotland Today have all been billed in this way. Every crime drama is automatically a psychological thriller, even the Col-Mustard-with-the-lead-piping types. But The Fall, written by Allan Cubitt, isn’t a whodunnit; rather it’s posing a set of altogether more interesting and creepy questions. Why does he do it, this terrible thing? How are the polis going to catch him? What if they don’t catch him? And the chief polis wifie, isn’t there something strange about her, too?

The serial killer – yes, another one – is known to us from the start, a man with a loving wife and kids. The polis on the ground – we’re in Belfast – are reluctant to accept the murders are the work of one person, which doesn’t impress DS Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson). She’s been brought across from the Met to shake up a sluggish force, evidenced by this priceless observation from the constable called to the intruded-upon home of Likely Victim No 3: couldn’t it have been the cat that arranged her knickers and vibrator on the bed like that?

Sex is a dominant theme. LVNo3, in a bar: “Most of what we call needs are desires.” Male colleague who fancies her: “What’s sex?” LVNo3: “Both, if you’re doing it right.” She talks like a sexpert; in fact she’s a lawyer. Then the killer is out with his wife and another couple and the other guy says: “Looking isn’t cheating; it’s just fantasy.” The killer is a sexpert, or some kind of relationship counsellor. We see him in his office, mediating. “How are things in the bedroom?”

Jings but he’s scary, doodling the woman in this malfunctioning relationship on his notepad, then not really watching his daughter’s little dance show because he’s just spotted a newspaper photo of his last victim and is thinking about the next one. Jamie ­Dornan is deserving of the kind of compliment that actors must regard as decisively back-handed: he’s utterly convincing as a serial-killer. And then there’s Anderson. I managed to miss all 202 episodes of The X-Files so have always been a bit behind you lot in appreciation. Like The Fall itself, though, she’s quiet, cool, slinky, unnerving and hugely watchable. In the back of a cop car, she spots a handsome detective on the job, requests an introduction and informs him: “I’m staying at the Hilton – room 203.”

The week’s other big new drama, Frankie, would appear to have little in common with The Fall. One is excellent; the other, written by Louise Gannon, somewhat less so. But there is this: Frankie Maddox, district nurse, is so much better than anyone else around her, just like Gibson. A colleague will be anxious about healthcare cutbacks and Frankie will say: “I laugh at cutbacks, I sneer at them!” No one in her practice is letting people die exactly, but there’s a lot of sitting around and eating cakes and only Frankie is helping the pregnant army wife, the sickly kid who’s been passed round six GPs and the woman trying to tend a terminally ill husband and dad with dementia at the same time. Frankie: “There must be something we can do for her.” Hard-nosed ­superior: “Why do you always insist there must be something we can do when sometimes there isn’t?”

So how does Frankie relax between bouts of saving the world? Is she perchance a – lazy shorthand alert – maverick? Does she have unusual personality quirks, maybe a complicated love life? Here goes: she likes to drive quite fast while listening to Ken Bruce. Her man’s in the polis and never sees her, not even on her birthday when he’s about to propose. Another hard-nosed superior, Scottish this one, tells our heroine: “Gonnae give it a rest with the guilt thing?” All that said, Frankie is played with a certain gap-toothed spunky charm by Eve Myles from Torchwood.

Rock’n’Roll Britannia dug up some of the pre-Beatles pioneers who played music on washboards. Some were interviewed in their slippers, in what appeared to be care homes – apart from Cliff Richard, still looking like a young one, who said: “You have to put aside your prejudices. History doesn’t give a darn whether an artist was liked or not. I played a major, major role.” «

Twitter: @aidansmith07