TV review: DCI Banks: Aftermath

THERE comes a time in the career of every popular middle-aged television actor when he must star in a sombre ITV detective drama. Think of it as an autumnal rite of passage.

You've paid your dues in numerous Sunday-night family favourites and travelogue spin-offs (what experts call "the Clunes Matrix") and become a familiar fixture on the cover of TV Quick. Only now are you ready for two hours of solemn emoting in the Yorkshire miasma, surrounded by body bags and with a killer in your sights. Are you ready for your close-up Mr Tompkinson?

The everyman's everyman, Stephen Tompkinson is a decent actor who imbues even his most lightweight roles with underplayed humanity. It's why audiences like him and why they'll tune into DCI Banks: Aftermath, despite having seen it countless times before.

It's to Tompkinson's credit that he injects some inner life into this quotidian 'tec. Decent, dedicated and empathetic, his only flaw is a tendency to compromise his professional judgement with emotional vendettas. Oh, when will these fictional lawmen learn? Don't they watch TV?

Divorced, and estranged from his children, our drizzled hero is haunted by his failure to stop a sadistic serial killer murdering four young girls. Just so we're clear about this, we witnessed him gazing at their ghosts standing judgmentally in his garden. Someone arrest the director for grievous misuse of symbolism.

Banks' only hope of redemption is finding an unaccounted-for missing girl. "It's all I have left," he lamented. But - curses and damnation! - his path is blocked by an attractive younger officer from Practice and Standards more interested in her career than police loyalty. You know how it goes: first they're at loggerheads, then in each other's arms back at his place, a symbolically remote retreat where nightly he nurses a reflective whisky and listens to jazz. Is the police force really full of men like this? In a way, I hope it is.

The only wrinkle in the formula is that - in the tradition of Columbo, but with none of that series' wit and ingenuity - we, and Banks, know who the killer is from the start. He died from brain damage at the end of the episode. Instead, the drama stems from unravelling the strands of how the murders came about, and whether Banks will find the missing girl and lay his demons his to rest.

I can't deny that it's solidly put together, but then it should be given that it studiously borrows every trick in the manual. Give a thousand monkeys a thousand typewriters and a thousand Wallander box-sets and they'd eventually come up with this, albeit possibly starring a monkey and set in a zoo. And I'd watch that.

Also, with its torture chambers, vicious rapes and missing girl campaigns, it strains for verisimilitude but instead feels exploitative of real-life cases. It's why I'm not a fan of most TV crime fiction: it just feels cheaply voyeuristic.It's odd that people find comfort in watching generic crime dramas featuring depressive detectives and grisly murders. It must be like settling into a deep bath filled with dirty warm water; unpleasant perhaps, but at least you know where you are. And you can always rinse off afterwards.