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Wandering in the post-Waking the Dead wilderness, aching for Trevor Eve and Sue Johnston, I was in dire need of a BBC drama which could be moody, compelling, and blur the lines of right and wrong. As if by magic, the BBC have dug into their shiny top hat, and what they have brought out is far more interesting than a bunny.
The Shadow Line, Hugo Blick’s atmospheric noir thriller with Christopher Eccleston and Chiwetel Ejiofor, aired last week under a great weight of expectation. The BBC has been trying really, really hard to keep us watching and after The Crimson Petal and the White, they had set the bar high to the 9 PM crowd. As an alternative offering to those who aren’t keen on creepy prostitute drama, The Shadow Line is almost a serious version of Life on Mars, in which the integrity of the police, and the merits of playing things by the book are called into question. Parallels can also be drawn between it and The Wire, though with fewer swearwords and more lingering shots of depressingly similar suburban houses, oddly unsettling when set to the eerie soundtrack.
The beginning is slow and menacing. The viewer hones in on two policemen who are slowly approaching a lone car in the dead of night, the only light coming from their torch beams. Inside is the murdered body of drug lord Harvey Wratten, just recently released from prison on a rare royal pardon, along with his unstable and fist-happy nephew Jay (Rafe Spall). The location is the car park of a bowls club - a comically Midsomer Murders-esque setting. The older of the two policemen, after probing the victim’s graphic injuries with far too much relish for my liking, pulls his partner away, while the viewer is left thinking that he is definitely bent. Sure enough, he turns up later on, in Joseph’s (Christopher Eccleston) gang, taking his cut.
Joseph, impeded by the loose cannon that is Jay and his concern for his Alzheimer’s-suffering wife (a concern which almost, but doesn‘t quite make you forget his drug-lord status), embarks on an investigation into Wratten’s death at the same time as Jonah Gabriel is doing the same in his official capacity as a police officer returning to active service after being shot in the head. He is suffering from amnesia, the greatest of all plot devices, and this is put to good effect at the cliff-hanger ending. Meanwhile, he is coping with being manipulated by his bosses into keeping his investigation low-key, which of course means that the police have been naughty, and is struggling with how Wratten managed to get a royal pardon in the first place. Something smells very fishy here.
The Shadow Line has an excellent atmosphere. It is quiet and confusing, practically monotone. Even in violent scenes it is hushed as though, as indeed is the point, every truth is blurred by shadow. It’s like wading through the inside of a pillow. For such biblically-named people, each protagonist is nicely flawed, while each situation is shrouded in mystery. It makes you curious, rather than letting you sit back and watch. Plus, I think that Eccleston could grow to replace Trevor Eve as my favourite tortured TV man.
The second episode of The Shadow Line airs this Thursday at 9pm on BBC2.
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