Wednesday 29 August 2012

Best Show of the Week: Murder.

On Sunday night,while BBC 1 was putting the nation into a coma with Inspector George Gently, and Sky 1 was failing, quite miserably, to tickle our collective funny bone with A Touch of Cloth, BBC2 quietly aired what is without doubt the best show of the week.

Murder was a one hour long and gripped you from start to finish. Thankfully all concerned resisted the urge to stretch it out over three episodes; there was enough incident and involving characters to do so. But oh the joy of sitting down for an hour and knowing you will see an outcome.

A young girl has been murdered in a Nottingham flat and the story is told, in the main, straight to camera, by the protagonists. I won't give anything away, so don't worry. But as the story unfolds you find your allegiances shifting as you just can't decide who did the crime or how. This makes Murder sound familiar territory, but it is far from that. I watched in rapt silence as it unfolded in front of me.

The show is excellently written by Robert Jones and tautly directed by The Killing's Birger Larsen, you can tell as well because the vistas of Nottingham look exactly like Copenhagen, eerily so. The acting is uniformly brilliant, and it seems unfair to pick anyone out but, Karla Crome as Coleen must have the BAFTA sewn up already. Let's hope this is the start, or return, of the hour long stand alone drama.

Catch Murder on BBC iPlayer and you will never again want to go back to those overblown five night snooze fests.

Over 

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