Falcon

Not that long ago the BBC took Michael Dibdin's excellent, complex Zen novels (well the first three) gutted them, drained them, and turned them into viewer friendly Sunday night scenery television. Italian Detective Aurelio Zen was far from an heroic hip character but Rufus Sewell played him with so much suave panache that he made James Bond look like Frank Gallagher. Well now Sky Atlantic have served us up Falcon.

I haven't read Robert Wilson's novels, so I have no idea if fans of the series are jumping up and down in apoplectic rage. But on watching the first adaptation, The Blind Man of Seville, I should imagine they are. If the Zen fiasco is anything to go by, the Falcon novels are probably complex character driven police thrillers with a feeling of Spain and Seville. Well we got none of that from Falcon the television series, as with Zen everyone speaks in an English accent, OK not a bad thing, who needs herds of dodgy Spanish accents all over the place. But why not cast Spanish actors who can speak English so we get a feel of the region. With all the accents flying about this could have been set, bullfight apart, in Surrey just as well as Seville. Who knows they could well have underground bullfights in Surrey, that's an idea Midsomer Matadors.

Marton (Scrabble nightmare surname) Csokas plays Detective Inspector Javier Falcon with all the brooding melancholy required of this kind of show. Trouble is, everything seemed a little hurried, what probably unwound perfectly in the novel, here seemed easy. Although Falcon did do a lot of running, through the golden lit streets of Seville, he never seemed to get anywhere and all his discoveries were 'House' moments. The sad thing was, the final reveal was quite shocking and surprising, but the rushed nature of the show left me cold. You could imagine it worked really well at the end of the novel, but here it sadly fell flat. Also, we had a few A Touch of Cloth moments, nowhere near as many as the dreadful, dreadful Thorne series, but a few. Will anyone ever be able to do an enigmatic flashback ever again without the spectre of A Touch of Cloth hovering over them? Not too sure I'll be returning to Seville for the second adaptation.

Over