The week in TV: Unforgotten; Virdee; Live Super Bowl LIX; Surviving Black Hawk Down
Unforgotten (ITV1) | itv.comVirdee (BBC One) | iPlayerLive NFL Super Bowl LIX (Sky Sports/Now)Surviving Black Hawk Down (Netflix)
As multinationals rush to appease the Orange One by ripping up their DEI policies, it can at least be said that British television is a lot less racially monochrome than it used be. Yet for all the inroads made into previously off-limits areas such as costume dramas, it's still quite rare to see lead actors of colour. So it's worth recognising that two primetime series on the most watched terrestrial channels last week featured South Asian-heritage actors in main roles, even if neither of them set the world on fire. The first, Unforgotten (ITV1), is now 10 years old, which is almost long enough to warrant its own cold case review.
The format of the six-part sixth series remains reliably unchanged: two police detectives – DI 'Sunny' Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar), and the more recent addition, DCI Jess James (Sinéad Keenan) – revisit an old crime, and the culprit is to be found somewhere among several disparate plot strands that slowly come together.
Although Khan is the series stalwart, his role is often thanklessly passive, which means being an exposition mouthpiece or asking the sort of questions designed to ensure that no viewer, however slow or distracted, is left behind. When a pathologist, inspecting a section of human spine dug out of an east London marsh, explains that cutting a femoral artery would lead to catastrophic blood loss followed by a heart attack, it's DI Khan's job to ask: 'Could that possibly be a cause of death?' Well, only in the same way that decapitation could possibly lead to health complications.
Chris Lang's writing seems to have slipped a little below the high standards established in Nicola Walker's leading role heyday. Yet there's a Zen-like acceptance to the way that Bhaskar delivers his lines, as if he's not going to let some leaden dialogue hinder the smooth running of proceedings. It's an unshowy performance of an undramatic part, to which he brings the necessary grounding in a storyline that contains more mysteries – why did DCI James's husband cook her sea bass? And where is Whitney Marsh? – than even the most dogged detective could ever hope to untangle.
If Bhaskar's heritage is incidental in Unforgotten, then it's at the heart of Virdee (BBC One), a new Bradford-set crime drama adapted from AA Dhand's novels. Harry Virdee is a detective whose Sikh father has disowned him because he married a Muslim woman. Virdee goes straight by the TV detective book in that he doesn't go by the book. He cuts corners, acts on instinct and is prone to lose interest in conventional investigative methods the moment a suspect doesn't immediately confess his guilt. To complicate matters, his beloved wife's brother is the head of a local criminal gang.
What differentiates Virdee from the countless cop shows from which it's derived is its focus on the protagonist's ethnicity. The crime plot has a cup of tea and puts its feet up early on in the story for about 15 minutes while we witness our hero's existential struggles with his divided cultural and familial obligations. This fusion of crime thriller and identity crisis might work better if it were handled more naturalistically. Instead, everything is emotionally and visually overwrought, so the effect is a little as if Dirty Harry has been relocated to a northern mill town and filmed with a Bollywood aesthetic.
That actually sounds more compelling than the first episode proved to be. One small but perhaps not inconsequential detail is that all of the main thugs and the lead psycho were white. No big narrative deal, it might be said, but in the week when the Reform party topped the polls, it will be interesting to see how Virdee goes down with a broad audience.
The Orange One was to be seen last week attending the NFL Super Bowl LIX (Sky Sports) game in New Orleans – a gladiatorial jamboree of physical prowess, mega-celebrity and posturing attitude that racked up more than six hours on my TV recorder. It began with Jon Batiste slightly mangling The Star-Spangled Banner, and continued, eventually, with the main attraction: a marathon of hyperbolic commentary and commercials interrupted by occasional snatches of a sports game.
I say main attraction, but of course that was really the half-time entertainment, a much-anticipated appearance by Kendrick Lamar. The dramatic tension rested on the question of whether or not the rapper would perform Not Like Us, his 'diss' track about his rival, the Canadian rapper Drake. To no big surprise he did, and a gleeful Serena Williams turned up to do the crip walk – a hip-hop dance move – on the grave of her former friend's reputation.
There's a way of viewing all this as great theatre, but is America's most treasured sporting event the appropriate venue for this highly lucrative spat to be played out? Even if rap didn't boast a lethal history of feud escalation, it would still look a lot like crass commercialisation of a personal vendetta.
No doubt the first sitting US president to attend a Super Bowl, and a keen grudge-holder himself, approved. But then Donald Trump wouldn't be alone. So widespread has been the Lamar love-in that I warmed to Neil Reynolds, the host of the British transmission, when he admitted that he had thought the rapper was a basketball player. That was presumably before he laid eyes on the music artist's economical 5ft 6in form.
Economical is seldom the word used to describe a Netflix documentary. And Surviving Black Hawk Down is no exception. It tells the story of the brutal 1993 battle in Mogadishu between Somali militants and American special forces that was the basis of Ridley Scott's 2001 film Black Hawk Down.
This three-part film is produced by Scott's TV company, and its strength is that, unlike the film, it offers a voice to the combatants on both sides as well as the civilians caught in the middle.
While it powerfully conveys the trauma of warfare, the effect is undermined by the relentless re-enactments of the battle scenes, which double its running time. The emotional truth is to be found not in the dramatised shootouts but in the simple etched faces, black and white, of the people who'd survived the real thing.
Star ratings (out of five)
Unforgotten ★★★
Virdee ★★★
Live NFL Super Bowl LIX ★★
Surviving Black Hawk Down ★★★
Amandaland
(BBC One)
Amanda (the excellent Lucy Punch) is one of those people with a panoramic blind spot. A small comic triumph of perfectly pitched social observations about minor downward mobility.
Hacks
(Now)
Jean Smart is fabulous as an ageing standup comedian who employs a young writer to update her act in this clever take on the generation gap.
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