A man in a black coat is digging with a spade in the rain at night. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he is digging up new potatoes for tea. Well, it doesn’t look like an allotment, more like a forest. And what is he dragging? Something quite heavy … I’ve an idea but, to be honest, it’s hard to see what’s going on. I see why it’s called In the Dark (BBC1).
Post titles, this new crime thriller, adapted from the novels of Mark Billingham, brightens up a bit. It’s daytime, an urban environment (Manchester, it turns out) and DI Helen Weeks (MyAnna Buring) and a uniformed copper with a Taser are chasing a female suspect – a drug dealer and benefits cheat. Catching her, too, in a dead end. But no, she gets away by punching DI Helen in the stomach. Oh, and Helen’s pregnant, though she hasn’t told anyone, not even her Paul (Ben Batt). Anyway, the baby is OK – thank heavens – she tells her Paul (also a DI). He is over the moon, Helen less so it seems. Possibly because she knows it’s not Paul’s? But certainly because she is an ambitious, successful detective inspector, and she is not sure the whole baby thing is for her. “I’m a copper, I can’t see myself sitting in cafes with my tits hanging out,” she says.
It’s not an unfamiliar theme in this kind of drama. And there are a few more of those not unfamiliar themes. A little police sexism, some of it brought on by her aforementioned knocked-upness. Then, just after Helen has told Paul their news, on the other news – the one on the telly – is the story of two girls who have disappeared. And not only has it happened in the fictional small Derbyshire town of Polesford where Helen grew up, but the wife of the chief suspect is Linda, Helen’s bezzie mate from back in the day. Fancy that.
Helen has never mentioned Linda to Paul before. Nor does he know that Helen used to be the school bully, and he definitely doesn’t know about Adam, who may be the actual father of her (not yet) bump. I am beginning to wonder what else Paul doesn’t know. So to the career/baby theme, we can now add: “maverick cop from the big city returns to place of possibly unhappy childhood, to interfere with someone else’s case, and unearth a few secrets and ghosts from the past, some of them actual ghosts”.
Hey, maybe it wasn’t actually a fella at the beginning, but Helen, in a black mac, digging up her own past. But then does The Past come in heavy-duty black bin liners? It’s just a hunch, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a connection between what has happened to these poor girls now and something that happened to Helen and Linda back in the day. “Do you ever think about what happened all those years ago?” asks Helen. “Every fucking day,” says Linda. That doesn’t sound like something trivial, does it, like the time they drank a bottle of cider in a field, or snogged so-and-so at the bus stop?
Oh, and the person whose case Helen is interfering with, whose toes she is standing on, is local DI Tim Cornish (played by Ashley Walters, who, of course, has his own ghosts – good ghosts, I think – in his real-life past, having once been Asher D in So Solid Crew). DI Tim just wants to pin everything on Linda’s husband and get the case closed, possibly because of pressure from above, or perhaps because of police corruption. Again, neither is totally unheard of in a police crime drama.
In short, In The Dark is by no means a trope-free zone. Plus there are a few fairly sizeable asks. Not just: OMG, there’s my old pal Linda on the news. But also how every time anyone switches on the telly – at Helen’s house, at her dad’s house, in the pub – there is a significant development in the disappearance of the girls being shown on the local news. It’s like there is a “plot update” button on their remote controls. And DI Helen Weeks doesn’t have the depth or the realness of, say, Sgt Catherine Cawood; In the Dark is not Happy Valley, shifted south a little, down the Pennines. This is something louder, less involving, less human. But once you have accepted that, it’s a crisp opener (of four) – pacy, thoughtful and skilfully constructed, with multiple strands I am eager to see twisted together again. Is there any significance to the rose tattoos, I wonder? And what about farmer Bob’s rustled piglets … And there’s that water, and a floating shoe, and some kind of grill with a piece of meat on it, alive with maggots. One of those piglets I hope. Though I doubt it.
