ITV1 really, really loves that succulent two-hour slot in the middle of Sunday evening, and anything that goes in there has the legacy of Morse, Lewis, Frost, Miss Marple et al to live up to. The latest cunning plan for Detective Sunday is to recruit the rather excellent Brenda Blethyn to play DCI Vera Stanhope in adaptations of Ann Cleeves's novels, set in the author's native North-East.
In fact, with the lineage of TV detectives now long enough to stretch to the moon and back several times, choice of location is becoming critical as a means of telling them apart. Vera is well served by its Northumbrian milieu, which ranges from the streets of Newcastle or Gateshead up the coast to Whitley Bay, Blyth and a potential assortment of historic sites including Holy Island and Bamburgh Castle. Much of the atmosphere of this opening episode derived from scenes set in windy sand dunes next to moody expanses of beach, with bare countryside dotted with medieval ruins stretching away inland.
Murder, Cleeves wrote, and our killer du jour had a penchant for choking his (OK, it was a male) young victims with thin cord, then arranging the corpses in or near water, decorated with a selection of local wild flowers. Why are crime writers so keen to burden their killers with so many fetishistic rituals? Perhaps it just makes it easier for their imaginary detectives to catch them.
Slightly disappointingly, resolution of the case came down to the familiar perm-one-from-four routine (if it wasn't that one then it must have been the next one, kind of thing), with Stanhope's suspicions centring on a group of bourgeois male bird-watchers whose relationships proved to be murkily incestuous. But the mechanism of the plot was largely there to hang the quirks and oddities of the protagonist on, and Stanhope has quite a few to be going on with (DCI Stanhope and her team, pictured above).
She's in the throes of dealing with the death of her father, who was a difficult, bullying character by the sound of it, and in the opening scenes Stanhope watched as her young sergeant, Joe Ashworth (David Leon), tipped pop's ashes into the Tyne. Stanhope is resolutely spinsterish, and apparently terrified of young children. When Ashworth gently wondered if she'd like to be godmother to his new-born baby, she went virtually rigid with shock, and had to look at some crime-scene photos to make herself feel better. She has little interest in fine dining or haute cuisine, and is apt to swig lustily from a bottle of whisky for relaxation. Her dress sense is Oxfam-gumshoe, with all expense spared. She makes Columbo look like Tom Ford.
Her style of detection is dowdy aunt with a chip on her shoulder - the first victim had been placed in a bath "like some poncey installation at the Baltic", as she tangily put it - mixed with spasms of seemingly genuine emotion, as when she desperately barked at her colleagues to get their fingers out so they could save missing 14-year-old Laura, who was looking ominously like the killer's next victim. Behind her bumbling-old-biddy-who-doesn't-know-much schtick, she is of course scarily shrewd and intuitive, and capable of slicing open alibis with razor-edged questioning (Stanhope with picturesque Northumbrian ruin, pictured above).
It's too early to say if Vera is going to be great, but this opener was skilfully paced to keep a nice balance between plot and character development, the locations lend real depth, and Blethyn is quite capable of turning Stanhope into an addiction. Strong support, too, from David Leon as Ashworth, who brings authentic Geordiness to the part despite being altogether far too pretty. Blethyn has admitted she took to studying Cheryl Cole on The X Factor to get her Tyneside accent in shape. She doesn't sound Welsh or Pakistani, so it must have worked.
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