Clichéd crime drama is a soggy summer washout
You could tell The Jetty (BBC One) was going to be bad by the fact that it was shoved out on a Monday in July, but last night’s opener provided confirmation. What is odder: a detective with so much time on her hands that she can spend it looking for crimes that nobody has reported, or a scene in which a troubled schoolgirl does something unmentionable to a horse? (I won’t go into detail here, but think of Rebecca Loos and that pig.)
Let’s start with the detective. Ember Manning (a functional Jenna Coleman) sets out to investigate an arson (ember, arson…) in the lakeside Lancashire town where she has spent her entire life. A boathouse has gone up in flames, soon after being bought by a wealthy Londoner. This owner, entirely reasonably, expects the police to look for the perpetrator. “I’m afraid that arsons are nearly impossible to solve, so we don’t actually spend too much time on them… I wish I could tell you otherwise, but then I’d just be pandering to your massive sense of entitlement,” Ember replies, and delivers a lecture about tourists pricing out the locals.
Soon, a pregnant 16-year-old lands on Ember’s windscreen from a height, and our heroine decides to investigate if the father of the child was an older man who engaged this unfortunate girl in underage sex. At the same time, our detective joins forces with a dreadful true-crime podcaster to investigate the cold-case disappearance of a 17-yearold schoolgirl (the horse enthusiast). Ember is a police officer, but has to keep pleading with this podcaster for help in solving the crime.
Teenage sex is the running theme here. Ember had her own daughter at 17. Series creator Cat Jones clearly wanted to write about grooming, blurred lines and the vulnerability of girls, about the secrets harboured by close communities, but it has ended up packaged in a drama that does all the wrong things. It fails on the basics, which isn’t Jones’s fault: badly lit and with dialogue that is sometimes hard to decipher. But the plot in the opening hour is such a mish-mash that I twice checked to see if I had started watching a later episode by mistake.
I think we’re supposed to admire Ember’s maverick approach to policing, which seems to involve no official policing whatsoever but a lot of covertly extracting information from schoolchildren and haranguing people in the pub. Her superiors certainly approve. One admiring boss says: “No authorisation to investigate, no case file, no cautioning of suspects – but put all that to one side and it’s not a bad piece of police work.”
In one of those marketing mysteries, UKTV has decided to rebrand as U. Which means that Drama, a nicely self-explanatory name for a channel, is now U&drama. The channel formerly known as Dave is now U&dave, and so on. And all of their programmes can be found on a streaming service called U. This doesn’t seem to improve anything for viewers, but I’m sure a team of transformation consultants (a real job title) have been well-paid for their time.
If any of this encourages you to look afresh at the channels, then you could do worse than watch Whitstable Pearl
(U&drama), which has returned for a second series. Based on the novels by Julie Wassmer, it taps into the trend for midlife lady detectives.
It’s a bit of a jumble: an odd-couple comedy, an aspirational lifestyle product and a cosy crime drama, all with the look of an old Nescafé advert. This series opens with the Pearl of the title, played by Kerry Godliman, in a cream cable-knit jumper gazing contentedly over the harbour while sipping from a candy-striped mug. This is a show to be enjoyed in the same way one enjoys flicking through a copy of Ideal Home and fantasising about moving to the coast.
Pearl Nolan is a restaurant owner in Kent who runs a private detective agency on the side, or maybe it’s the other way around. To solve crimes, she teams up with a real detective named Mike (Howard Charles). Pearl is a maternal character with a close family – she was training to be a police officer but teenage pregnancy got in the way – and Mike is more of a brooding loner, but they are romantically drawn to each other. Whitstable Pearl is also a midlife soap opera of sorts, complete with a meddling mother, Dolly (Frances Barber). Oh, and did I mention that some of the stories are themed, so one of the episodes in this series is an homage to Rear Window?
It’s not as cosy as Midsomer Murders,
and the dialogue is a bit more down to earth. “I’m freezing my t–s off,” says Dolly, when asked how she enjoyed her early morning dip in the sea. As with so many crime series, the plots are perfunctory and the endings a letdown. But it has a certain charm.
The Jetty ★★ Whitstable Pearl ★★★