A funeral, at a crematorium, with a big police presence, headed by DI Viv Deering (Joanna Scanlan). Because the lad who died was son of Nora Attah (Rakie Ayola), matriarch of one of Manchester’s most feared criminal families. Dad is here too, a convicted murderer, no longer married to Nora …
BOOM! Uh-oh, big explosion, in the middle of Amazing Grace. Possibly a gas explosion, more likely a bomb. And Dad’s no longer here, he’s got a Clean It Up no pooing (if you’re a dog) sign buried in his skull. And Nora, who was cuffed to her now-deceased ex for the service, breaks his hand in order to get free. She’s well hard, Mrs Attah.
As is DI Viv. At the station (with all the green tiles, the most unlike-a-police-station police station on television), she’s showering off the debris, and giving herself a thorough from-the-front down-there towelling in front of a new colleague, before getting busy with the case. Good, strong, no-nonsense female characters, as you’d expect from Paul Abbott who created No Offence (Channel 4).
Back at the bomb site and there are bits of person all over the place. Well, in the crater mainly, but these are not people who were killed by the blast. They were buried there already. I know, buried at a crematorium, ironic huh? Randolph Miller (Paul Ritter), the bipolar forensics dude, is excited about trying to put the bits back together.
Ah, and here is the head of Herbie Attah, whose cremation it was, in a bucket. So he wasn’t in the coffin after all, it was just sandbags of approximately Herbie’s weight. The bomb was inside Herbie, meant to go off in the chapel, killing everyone there. But the mother and son crematorium owners have been interring their clients instead of baking them because they are having problems with their gas bills. Have they looked into switching providers, I wonder? I hear it is very easy and quick to do. Oh, they did have the money, only the son blew it on fat prostitutes, according to Mum.
But that, and they, are a sideshow, to the main event. Because there is an actual plot of sorts, slowly emerging from the smoke, the dust. Turf war, rival Manchester gangs, killing each other. I think. I am not going to lie, I was bloody confused a lot of the time, and I did actually check that this really was the first episode of the (second) series, and that I had not missed one that would make things clearer.
It doesn’t really matter, though. I may not have much idea what is going on, but I am having a good time. It’s like being in the stocks and having Abbott hurl stuff at you, on fast forward so there is barely room to breathe, or think, between hits. Body parts, decomposing ones, rude ones, bam, bam, bam. Toilets, mental health, comedy racial stereotypes, go on then. And glorious lines, mainly from Viv: “Don’t kick off but your son’s not much more than a smoothie”, or, “That’ll be faith in my own judgment running down my legs.”
She is a brilliant creation, rude as eff and in your face, but also warm and human, and adored by her team of under-resourced crime-stoppers. Rude and warm, it is a lovely combination.
Here is another head that looks as if it might have something to do with No Offence, but actually it is part of Italy’s Invisible Cities (BBC 1) ... “Some time you find a skeleton with the top of the skull missing, because the heat is so intense that the brain boils and blows the skull apart,” says Professor Andrew Wallace, unable to hide his glee. He is talking about Vesuvius, because the Italian city in this first one is Naples and its surroundings (right now we are in Herculaneum).
“There’s a detail, wow,” says one of the presenters, Alexander Armstrong, I think impressed but trying to show some respect for the poor man or woman, even if they did die nearly 2,000 years ago. Xander and his subterranean exploration partner Dr Michael Scott are delving into the extraordinary and fascinating tunnels – Roman aqueducts, quarries, Bourbon escape routes, the beginnings of a more recent metro that never got finished – which criss-cross under the city, full of ghosts and stories and abandoned scooters. Then techy people flood them with cutting-edge technology – scans and cams, and CGI – to make a 3D map. Of the city’s intestines.
There is something of forensic pathology about it. Except that it’s not a postmortem but a pre-one. Because, up above, Naples is very much alive.
