Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show Above Suspicion

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

One of the tremendous things which British television does very well is the short-term drama which manages to take the Play for Today idea that had worked so well in the past and bring it into a 6- or 8-episode format. The one-off Play for Today type program was based upon the idea that a theatrical style play would translate onto television if there was sufficient due regard to it as a single medium: it worked really well because of the writers who worked on them. Television mined the theatres and got writers not just of note, but also of great skill and the Play for Today format worked.

Real drama of socially difficult topics was now on mainstream TV. The British public loved it for a while but then the entertainment of more popular and less cerebral programs won the day and it started to die off.

What seemed to grow out of it, however, was the demand for some single dramas which would make a similar impact to the social realism and gritty topics of the televisual plays. It was not long before the emergence of writers who further understood the type of format which appealed, or they and the commissioners knew that their books and novels would translate with less lost than gained. Just as composers of classical music found a new milieu in television theme tunes, so too did writers find a new format in which many excelled.

The queen of the format must be Lynda La Plante.

Her writing was crisp, characters rounded and whilst the most famous of them all is Jane Tennyson, played so brilliantly by Dame Helen Mirren, there were plenty of other fantastic examples of how she was able to work her magic. Of course, La Plante was crime based and being the most popular genre in television her drama muscles were flexed, mainly, in the mainstream but she clearly got her pen dipped in the realistic and caustic background of the characters she sought to mine.

We loved them but there were times when the one series, the one drama was not enough and it got extended to the point at which it broke, just a little more than it ought.

Step forward ITV’s Above Suspicion.

Based on a series of her own novels, the premise was pretty straight forward. It followed the crime solving exploits of James Langton, played by Ciaran Hinds and Anna Travis, played by Kelly Reilly. Rather than focus on the head of a team, in this case that would have been Langton, it spent its time working with the Detective Constable Anna Travis, who was new to the crime solving role. La Plante sought to show that Travis had the ability to deal with the misogynistic anachronisms that were prevalent in the police force.
So far, so good.

In fact, rather than be the woman who adopted the macho culture and out macho’ed the men, she wore the heels, she wore the skirts and did not shy away from being a woman. It worked as we were forced to consider the focus and the character in a new and exciting manner.

Initially broadcast over consecutive nights for the first three series, this adopted the more traditional weekly slot for the fourth and final series. It was a short series with the first being two episodes and over the four seasons it ran for only eleven. The first series saw a serial killer being caught and Travis showing her skills. The two episodes were 90 minutes each in length like little films but then things changed.

The three hours of exposure were kept but now we had three episodes of 60 minutes each. The focus for series two became La Plante’s novel Red Dahlia, which I had read. This was the way to do a second series. It built on the first partly because the origin of the material was just so damn good and the building of tension quite masterful.

Series three continued to play to the three-episode format, and the grisly nature of the crimes continued. There was beginning to be felt, however, a lack of development and the end may not have been nigh, but it was certainly being foreshadowed. Had we finished after the first or even the second series, I would have been happy and felt it had challenged the format; but we had to have a fourth.

Here we got the fury of Langton as he had missed out on a promotion to Commander and was now an unhappy copper. There was tension between the two protagonists as Langton blames the blameless Anna for ruining his promotion chances. We then have the revelation that Anna fancies Langton and it descends at that point into standard fare.

Thus far? Not good.

The feminist message is lost but hey, it did give us a lot to chew before it gorged on the mainstream, and I particularly loved the second series.

It just goes to so you that sometimes, you just need to know when to stop…

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television, you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…