Dalgliesh
Channel 5
★★★☆☆
You can’t always judge the calibre of a crime writer by the ghastliness of their murders. Agatha Christie, the genre’s grande dame, mostly kept hers nice and clean, straightforward poisoning being her favourite killing method. In Dalgliesh, Channel 5’s new adaptation of PD James’s 1970s novel Shroud for a Nightingale, poor Nurse Pearce’s death was utterly gruesome. She was “volunteered” to be a “patient” fed by a gastrostomy tube during a demonstration for student nurses. But some rotter had poured carbolic acid into the warm milk, so she thrashed like a seal in agony as her stomach corroded from the inside.
It was horrific, but moreish. You can’t switch off after that. And we hadn’t even yet seen Bertie Carvel who, as the cerebral detective/poet Adam Dalgliesh, is taking up a role previously played by Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw. Whether we needed a second revival is debatable, but I do like a 1970s drama so I’m not complaining.
Carvel, with sideburns, a three-piece suit and a slightly bouffant hairdo, pulled off a quiet, restrained performance, gentle of voice and as big on facial expressions as dialogue. This subtlety was as far removed as you could get from his previous creepy weirdo roles, in ITV’s The Sister and the BBC’s 2020 adaptation of Christie’s The Pale Horse. But then Carvel is a great shape-shifter. Sometimes you don’t recognise him in roles, which I mean as a compliment.
His understated performance gave things a touch of class, which was just as well because his boorish, moustachioed, cocky sidekick DS Masterson (Jeremy Irvine) was drawn as a cartoonish Sid the Sexist, who shared the fact that his “first porno” had featured twins. (“It ’ad me seeing double for weeks,” he said. Yeah, mate — I bet it did.)
Advertisement
Dalgliesh was the thoughtful foil to this Life on Mars-era copper. After Jo Fallon (Siobhán Cullen), in her hospital bed, had asked if he was related to “the very good poet” Adam Dalgliesh, he said nothing, but from his face we knew that he was flattered yet too modest to lap up the compliment. Masterson asked Dalgliesh if he was married. “My wife died recently as I’m sure you’re aware,” he replied. “And if not, you’re the only officer in Scotland Yard who’s missed it. I’ll have a Scotch please.” So we knew that his soul was in pain but he wouldn’t let Masterson dabble his nicotine-stained fingers in his grief.
There were unspoken layers of menace. The scene in the hut during which a kitchen girl (Lily Newmark) offered Dalgliesh sex and told him, “It won’t cost ya,” suggested a culture of sexual abuse in that big house (I haven’t read the novel). One of the standout performances was Natasha Little as Matron Mary Taylor, a woman with great poise but who you felt was hiding something. Little, like Carvel, is adept at portraying hidden depths lightly.
The subtlety all went to pot when Dalgliesh awoke in the night, in the middle of a Scooby Doo-corny thunderstorm, suddenly knowing that Fallon was in danger because he remembered that she had been discharged even though the sister had said she was staying in hospital. He arrived to find her dead. Eh? Am I being dim or was that bit overcooked ham? But it was one weak point in a mostly strong episode (it concludes tonight). Carvel is already making the role his own.
