If this really is the next 007, he’ll have to stop looking so gloomy
Psychopath hunter Luther (BBc1) is back and that means one urgent, insistent question is gripping the nation: will Idris Elba be the next James Bond — the first black 007?
No reason why not, you might think. author Ian Fleming imagined his cold War spy hero as a chiselled six-footer with slick, inky hair and ice-blue eyes, but that was in 1952: Bond has regenerated like a time Lord since then.
and I’d say a black Bond is closer to Fleming’s saturnine ideal than the blond and soulless Daniel craig, who looks like a Gestapo extra from ’allo ’allo!.
sir Roger Moore drew squeals of faux outrage earlier this year when he said the ideal Bond was ‘English-English’. Lefty chatterers cried ‘racist’, as they always do. But they fundamentally fail to understand the thespian mind.
Before craig, the other actors who played Bond were a scot, an australian, a Welshman and an Irishman. only sir Rog was English: he was simply pointing out why he was the best.
In 2006, when craig took over the licence to kill for casino Royale, producer Barbara Broccoli missed her chance to cast instead another black star, Londoner colin salmon. she certainly knew about him: salmon (now, at 53, too old for the role) had played bit parts in three 007 movies starring pierce Brosnan.
and he has the most important quality, one that both Moore and sir
BIG KID OF THE NIGHT: Actor Will Mellor was lost in nostalgia as he played with the toys of his childhood in That’s So Last Century (C4). ‘I’d love to have a day with all these,’ he sighed. ‘It takes you right back to when everything was innocent.’ That’s his Christmas sorted, then.
sean connery possess, and that craig woefully lacks — a voice like sundering granite.
Elba’s voice doesn’t matter so much in Luther, because mostly he is expected only to grunt, growl, stare balefully and stand like a sullen statue on rooftops. When he does speak, his lines are so heavily encased in irony that they crush the conversation.
a friend asks how he’s doing: ‘Everything’s ticketty boo, totally disco,’ intones DcI John Luther, dropping every word like stones into the pocket of a drowning man.
he’s trying to give up policing, and even has a plan to run off to puerto Rico with his deeply criminal girlfriend. But there’s a psychopath on the loose, nailing victims to the furniture and eating their hearts, while living in a blood- drenched apartment decorated with collages of polaroids.
It’s such a stereotyped set-up that you’d suspect the murderer was self-taught from the Dummy’s Guide to Being a sadistic Monster. Either that, or writer Neil cross has deliberately constructed the plot from horror-movie cliches, because the old scares are the best.
that might be a thrill for splatter fiction addicts, but to millions of ordinary viewers it just feels jaded and frustrating. too often these days, BBc dramas pander to narrowing bands of obsessive fans: sherlock and Doctor Who are both guilty.
Luther had its moments. Game of thrones’ Rose Leslie was good as the raw detective, trying not to look rattled at the murder scenes. and patrick Malahide was excellent as the gangland boss who appeared to have wandered in from the sweeney and stole all his scenes with the ruthlessness of a professional bank robber.
anyone who felt they might need help recognising a crazed psychotic fiend could tune to Meet The Psychopaths (c5) for a 20-point checklist of giveaway traits. Lack of empathy was one. absence of remorse was another.
a kind heart and a guilty conscience would certainly be character flaws in a serial killer. In case we couldn’t tell the difference between a maiden aunt and a mass murderer, this documentary had some helpful examples: ‘Few would doubt hitler was a psychopath,’ explained the voiceover.
then it undermined itself, by playing a tape recording of the Fuhrer in amiable conversation. he wasn’t shrieking. he wasn’t chewing the carpet. If it weren’t for the fact that he had invaded Russia earlier that afternoon, he might almost have seemed sane.
this is the problem with psychopaths, we were told. Unless you discover them in the act of torture and dismemberment, they can be terribly difficult to spot.
thank goodness the ones that Luther knows tend to live in bloodstained lairs. that must make his job much easier.