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Review
Grace, series 3, review: meat-and-potatoes cop drama is sorely in need of some flavour
John Simm's DI Roy Grace is a thoroughly decent chap, but this by-numbers crime drama lacks colour and tension
A young woman in a short pink dress walking along a city street at night. A wolf whistle. A white van. Anyone who has ever switched on a TV would know where this montage was heading. It’s not only the routine storyboard of every second crime drama, it’s also always in the news, when the perpetrators sometimes turn out to be in uniform.
Grace (ITV) is back with a third serving of meat-and-potatoes procedural. Adapted from the crime novels of Peter James, its feature-length episodes update the seamy netherworld of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock to the present day. Almost anyone in this free-and-easy neck of the woods could be up to no good.
In Dead Like You, the first story in a new series, that included the incoming ACC, Cassian Pewe (previously played by James D’Arcy, now reincarnated as Sam Hoare). A lordly chief constable, he found himself under suspicion for a spree of abductions, sexual assaults and a murder, all performed in a rubber suit and some sort of gimp mask. Preposterous, perhaps, but these things do happen.
Also in the frame was a rogue’s gallery of sex pests, the sort of roles actors love inhabiting as they get to show their moves. Rollo (Luke Norris) was a cocksure posho who got into the habit of bullying while at public school. Then there was creepy Johnny (Thomas Coombes), a pathological mummy’s boy who talked inappropriately to the women in his taxi and, in his other job on a ghost train, serially groped them.
Men, eh? They didn’t come well out of this story. That the culprit turned out to have an even more complicated, deviant and frankly implausible psychology – well, that’s entertainment.
Thank heavens for the upstanding DI Roy Grace (John Simm) and his squeaky-clean cohort of slightly plastic colleagues who explain things to one another in overt and presentational dialogue. The only one of them having much fun is Craig Parkinson, who so shamelessly cocks an ironic eyebrow as legacy copper DS Norman Potting with his old-school ways that he seems to have sauntered in from a different script altogether.
You worry that the saintly Grace is a bit too stolid for Simm, who in his youth embodied many a zippy livewire. A quirk or two might make endow his decency with more charisma. This is a TV detective so colourlessly married to his job he’s now dating the show’s nice criminal pathologist.
A subplot about Grace’s long-lost wife who’s gone missing in Germany is meant to drip-feed tension into his narrative. In this viewer it simply triggered suppressed memories of Downton Abbey when Lady Edith’s chap was condemned to an identical fate because, at a guess, the actor had better things to do with his time.
As ever, the fictional police are very good at clearing up cases of sex crime. “We take every allegation of rape and sexual assault very seriously,” DI Grace informed the press after the mystery of the Brighton Prowler had been cracked. “Highest standards of care … urge you to come forward.” Etcetera. Give that good man a job in the Met’s Augean stables.