Annika review – Nicola Walker as a maritime murder cop is sure to reel you in

Ever since Nicola Walker was unforgivably written out of Unforgotten, leaving Sanjeev Bhaskar with no one to moon at over the body bags, the hunt has been on to find her another job in TV’s bulging crime sector. She could have been Ted Hastings’ successor at AC-12. Or headed up the new team at CSI Islington. Or played the lead in The Cressida Dick Story.

Instead, Walker has been put on a boat in the comedy crime drama Annika (Alibi). She’s the new DI at Scotland Police’s Maritime Homicide Unit. It sounds as made up as head of bicycle crime at the LAPD, or Alexander Lukashenko’s humanitarian adviser.

Are there really enough maritime murders in Scotland to warrant this? Don’t send me the figures. In all the many times someone said, “There’s been a murder!” on Taggart, it was never because a body had been thrown from the Gourock to Dunoon ferry.

And yet here we are in TV’s August with nothing to cling to but the life raft of Walker reprising the role of DI Annika Strandhed she once played on Radio 4. Like Brenda Blethyn’s Vera, Annika is a dowdy crime-solving supercop, but with the twist that she is also a Norwegian single mum. Walker gives her character an accent that makes Annika sound like she’s from the southern part of Norway locals call Bethnal Green.

Her daughter, Morgan, 15, hates her new school, has made no friends in drama club, drinks vodka and goes all Kevin the teenager about the daily boat trip from home. Little brat. How can she not appreciate living in a loch-side house with the sublime backdrop of mountains rising from presumably corpse-infested waters? Her mum, as is the way in these charming but formulaic dramas, is a fond parent but too busy finessing her conviction stats to communicate properly.

In this opening episode, Annika womansplains Moby-Dick to camera, which, were she not Walker would have made me feel like Emma Stone when Ryan Gosling explained jazz to her in La La Land. That said, Annika does offer up a feminist re-reading of Melville’s classic. Captain Ahab, she tells us, only spent one night with Mrs Ahab, and that night led to the daughter he never saw. “It’s not clear how Mrs Ahab dealt with her. Perhaps she put her in drama club.” Asides like this work well on radio, but on telly breaking the fourth wall risks echoing Kevin Spacey’s shtick in House of Cards.

Back to the story. There’s been a murder! On the Clyde! I know! Cause of death? Harpoon through the eye. “Melville had a lot to say about harpoons,” says Annika to camera. “Me too. I think death by harpoon suggests,” and here Walker’s cheekbones rise to decorous prominence in anticipation of the punchline, “someone who’s trying to get a point across.”

There follows a body swap and a rather unsatisfying boat chase. But, like most crime dramas, the whodunnit comes second to the story’s main sources of interest – the scenery and the comedy of daffy Annika failing to manage both her daughter and her new team.

In the office, there’s Tyrone, the bungling newbie who manages to get held hostage by a crossbow teacher. There’s Blair, who favours boiler suits and is so proverbially undervalued that a barista writes “Blah” on her coffee cup. In reality, though, like Chloe Bishop in Line of Duty, Blair does all the detecting while more highly paid principals flounce about. And then there’s DS Michael McAndrews, the old lag who, though hunky in a desiccated way, not only has a mullet but has spent so much of his life diving for bodies he may be a mullet’s great-grandson. He’s sulking because Annika got the job he thinks by rights is his. Taggart would have washed that sulk right off his fish face in a loch; DI Annika, sadly, is too nice for that.

I don’t know what crimes are to be investigated next by this ludicrous drain on Caledonian public finances, but the dialogue is so droll and the performances so charming I’m in for what fisherfolk call the long haul. If there isn’t a puffin slayer operating from his Fingal’s Cave lair by episode six, I’ll be surprised.