3 hours ago
7
’Ello, ’ello. What’s goin’ on ’ere, then? Criminal Record, is it? A second series, you say? Well, strike a light, guv, cos here it comes, nee-nawing through London’s perp-spattered streets with another investigational pea-souper. In the thick of it, once again, is DCI Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), baring his lower teeth while glowering at us through the windscreen of his Skoda Malfeasance.
Not that Capaldi’s peerlessly unsettling presence is the Apple TV drama’s sole distinguishing feature, mind. There is its depiction of London as a city impervious to natural light, with conversations, interrogations and “roughings-up” conducted against a backdrop of faulty streetlights and flickering tower-block TV sets. There is its portrayal of systemic corruption, with everything from the CID’s dimpled glass doors to the foreheads of its junior plods slick with an oily sheen of venality. And there are the questions it poses re the nature of control, with DS June Lenker (the ever-excellent Cush Jumbo) tormented by notions of who is in charge, and who ought to be.
But at Criminal Record’s heart – its scrunched-up, ossified heart – is Capaldi: chin smushed into his chest; mouth ajar; eyes the colour of a bruise. This is Capaldi’s signature look – and quite devastating it is, too.
“Blimey, this is a bit intense,” you may find yourself gulping as Hegarty peers out of yet another window with the pained absent-mindedness of a ferret with an undiagnosed UTI. A corrupt ferret. The full extent of whose corruption was only exposed at the end of the last series. (For those who missed it; this found Hegarty manipulating an innocent man into confessing to murder).
And so we commence the second series of Paul Rutman’s drama knowing, or assuming we know, exactly what he is capable of. As indeed, does Lenker, who spent most of the first series weaving and slinking around the unblinking Met veteran. Is it possible that Hegarty has softened? Could the text message he sends Lenker after two years of radio silence (“coffee?”) signify an attempt to rebuild what was once, at best, an uneasy alliance?
As if. But Lenker is vulnerable. She is haunted by her failure to save a teenage boy murdered by far-right extremists at a political rally. Guilt and idealism prove an unhelpful combination. Errors of judgment ensue. Hegarty’s nostrils twitch. Scenting insecurity, he approaches his ex-colleague with a carrot that doesn’t so much dangle as swing like a wrecking ball.
“I heard you’d retired,” says Lenker, feigning nonchalance over a cup of exposition in London’s worst-lit cafe. “No,” comes a peaty, oak-aged rumble from the shadows. “They moved me to intelligence.”
From this injudicious vantage point, Hegarty has been watching a far-right group led by one Cosmo Thompson (another ferociously watchable turn from Dustin Demri-Burns), an athleisure-swathed charmer from the oi-oi-saveloy school of fascism. One of Thompson’s boot boys – a berk called Billy Fielding – has escaped from prison. Hegarty wants said berk to lead him to Thompson. Lenker, meanwhile, believes Fielding to be responsible for the murder of the teenage boy.
“Help me run him down,” rumbles Hegarty.
“You want me to work for you?” splutters Lenker.
“Change of scene,” he replies.
“You make it sound like a mini-break.”
“No,” hisses Hegarty, his ferrety death-stare turned to 11. “It’s better than a mini-break.”
And it is. If, that is, your idea of a quality getaway involves attempting to foil a bomb plot while being chased through underpasses by gnashing yahoos in cagoules.
Criminal Record is not an enormously complex affair. Instead, it offers relatively straightforward and beautifully paced storytelling, its narrative twists emerging like handkerchiefs from a sleeve. The show’s complexity lies in its characters. Here, everyone is in their own world, professionally, emotionally and morally: fragile planets circling one another as their weaknesses contract and expand.
Now that we know not to trust either Hegarty or Lenker, the tension is, this time round, even greater. Suspense builds, continues to build and then – flamin’ Nora – builds some more. How long, we wonder, before the elastic twangs back?
