Celine Buckens gives a striking performance in new BBC crime drama Showtrial

Undergraduates are known for coming up with creative reasons to miss seminars and extend deadlines, but being apprehended as part of a missing person investigation is a pretty extreme excuse for not doing a bit of coursework. Still, a police station holding cell is probably quieter, warmer and cleaner than most student dorms.

Although, it’s probably not the kind of spartan accommodation that the detainee Talitha is accustomed to as the daughter of the influential property tycoon, Sir Damian Campbell. Did the fact that her father made a killing let her believe she could get away with murder? It’s the first in what will undoubtedly be many questions that will arise while watching BBC’s new crime procedural Showtrial — the latest show by the team who made the immensely popular Line of Duty.

The series announces itself with an auspiciously pacy opening sequence that intercuts flashbacks from a university carnival where the victim Hannah was last seen — or rather, coldly gazed at by Talitha — with scenes from a future courtroom circus. And while there’s a certain lack of imagination, and even irresponsibility, about a show once again mining entertainment from the harm inflicted on a pretty young woman, the focus here promisingly seems to be more about this most unusual suspect, than the grim particularities of the crime.    

It’s a testament to Celine Buckens’ performance that her character provokes such fury within a handful of minutes. Stricken with a serious case of affluenza, Talitha reacts to her arrest, her onetime friend’s disappearance and the accusations levied against her with a recalcitrant boredom and a mocking, rictus grin born of two decades of unchecked entitlement.

“[This bracelet] is worth more than you’ll earn in your entire career,” she taunts an officer as she hands over her possessions on being taken into custody. Justice is not so blind that a jury can’t become sufficiently biased to convict an odious, if innocent, defendant, she’s warned by her unflappable lawyer, Cleo (Tracy Ifeachor). 

Like seemingly every other protagonist in this genre, Cleo too has a diminished reputation to restore after a high-profile professional failure. But even more criminally complacent in terms of the writing, is the fact that she appears to have had something of a personal history with the prosecutor assigned to this very case. What are the chances!

All this is of course entirely secondary to Cleo’s relationship with Talitha. The success of the series hinges on whether the former is able to destabilise our immediate, instinctive judgments about what her egregiously unpleasant client may have been capable of.

★★★☆☆

On BBC1 from October 31 at 9pm

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