Showtrial review — it’s a mesmerising performance, right on the edge of ham

Céline Buckens, left, and Tracy Ifeachor in the BBC drama Showtrial

JOSS BARRETT/BBC

There and then, though, there was homogeneity. Wherever you had come from, you now all had the same room and drank in the same bar. Irrespective of whether you’d spent the summer holidays working in an abattoir or visiting Grandad’s palace in Ljubljana, you also still basically all had nothing to talk about or do except for each other. Never again would you hang out with so many people, all so different, and all exactly the same.

This, I think, is the best route into Showtrial, which began this week. One episode has been broadcast and the rest are on BBC iPlayer, a situation that is frankly becoming the bane of this job because it leaves me with no idea how much to review. Even in the first episode, though, you will learn that it is really a drama about three very different students at Bristol University: the daughter of a multimillionaire, the son of a shadow cabinet minister, and a working-class girl who was notable for her intellectual brilliance but is now notable mainly for vanishing. With the big, looming question being: why?

Céline Buckens is the show’s central point, turning in a mesmerising performance right on the edge of ham as Talitha, the rich kid. One of those girls who always wears her jacket slumped down to her elbows. You know? Long emerald nails, clearly destined to break. Estranged from her parents (a property developer and a former It girl), she oozes entitlement and cares not one bit for the concerns of anybody else, even when they are the police and holding her in a cell.

Joseph Payne plays Dillon, whose mum is the politician. He’s like Talitha’s pet, trailing her around. I’d love to talk about what we learn about him in later episodes, particularly as relates to rivers and wheelie bins, but I shan’t. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler, though, to say there’s a trial coming up. It’s in the title.

Tracy Ifeachor is Cleo, Talitha’s ambitious lawyer. Sinéad Keenan is DI Paula Cassidy, trying to nail her. Away from the students, much of the drama here concerns the quite technical wranglings between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service about who to prosecute, and how, and a grief subplot (the dead girl’s mother) and another one about abuse. Each one of them, I think, could have been a drama of its own, but here they are all twisted together.

Showtrial was made by World Productions, most recently best known as the studio behind Line of Duty, which I appreciate some might not regard as wholly promising, schlock-drama-wise. A more useful bit of background info, though, might be that it was written by Ben Richards, who long, long ago wrote the political drama Party Animals, to which this sometimes feels tonally similar. Either way, if Talitha doesn’t annoy you so much that you want to do to your telly what she may or may not have done to her friend Hannah, you’ll find this one turning into a thumping, nuanced courtroom drama by the end. I thought it was great.

Mandip Gill, Jodie Whittaker and John Bishop in Doctor Who

JAMES PARDON/BBC

I can’t pretend that I’ve totally been following Doctor Who for the last, ooh, 15 years or so. I could pretend otherwise, but you’d see through me in an instant. It would be a bit like trying to review a popular Greek soap opera, in Greece, without speaking Greek. I do know, though, that this is to be the last full series with Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor and Chris Chibnall as the showrunner (not an alien, he just runs the show) before Russell T Davies takes over again. So it seemed like a good time to catch up.

Hmm. Quite a lot of space monsters these days, eh? Those angel statue people who play grandmother’s footsteps are back, but I think only as a bit part. We also have seven billion dog-faced things heading to Earth in individual spaceships, one of whom has already abducted John Bishop. We have a big, melty-faced leper dude who has been held hostage since the dawn of everything, but is now on the loose and making the universe explode.

Too much CGI, if you ask me. I liked it better when it was all just Peter Davison in a cupboard, pretending. More than that, though, it’s just all too big. The dog-faced monsters turn out to have an interesting motivation (rescue, loyalty, satire), but seven billion of them is at least 6,999,999,996 too many. And does it always have to be the whole universe in peril? It’s just, once you’ve saved the universe once, it does feel a little, “oh huh, that again”. Couldn’t it just be a small bit of it? Wouldn’t that be more interesting? Maybe something the size of Wales?

Valley of Tears is being talked about as the new Fauda, which is daft because Fauda was daft. Fun, yes, but daft also. It’s, like, dude, just because you think you look like you belong at that Palestinian wedding doesn’t mean the other people at the wedding will too. I mean, they probably know each other. It’s a bloody wedding. Come on.

Valley of Tears is not daft. Or at least, not so far. It’s a very slick Israeli dramatisation of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egypt, Syria and a bunch of other countries (which bizarrely included Cuba) launched a surprise attack on Israel, intending to regain control of territory conquered by Israel in the previous war (oh, so many wars) of 1967. It went, frankly, badly, with Israeli troops rebounding to directly threaten Cairo and Damascus within a fortnight or so. It was also, though, the point at which Israeli consciousness seems to have decided that the end of one war would only ever be a lull before the next.

In as much as I can tell, all this is less about the geopolitics and more about the action. We meet Avinoam, an intelligence officer in a bunker on the Lebanon/Syria border. He’s a bit of a slacker, wandering about in his pants and cradling a guinea pig, but he’s also something of a Cassandra. From the messages he hears, he’s sure an attack is looming, but nobody takes him seriously. Then the shells start falling. Meanwhile, Marco and Alush are in a tank unit. They are Middle Eastern Israelis, sick of the marginalisation they face at the hands of European-descended Israelis, but they’re about to have to park all that to go to war.

I’m out on a bit of a limb with Valley of Tears because there were two episodes broadcast on Friday night, but at the time of writing Channel 4 had only managed to show me one of them. It has already been shown in Israel and the US, though, and seems to have been a bit of a hit. From the first I’m personally hooked, although if the second turns out to have seven billion dog-faced aliens in it, then I take it all back.

Finally, a brief word on Dalgliesh, a new detective series with Bertie Carvel, an actor I always notice because somebody once told me I might look like him if I could lose two stone and grow back my hair. I’ll take it. He plays, of course, Adam Dalgliesh, the poet policeman of PD James. This is not the first TV dramatisation of the books, but the last person to give it a go was Martin Shaw in 2004. So, a top-notch sleuth was going spare.

It’s fine. We find ourselves in a training centre for nurses, where one has just been gruesomely poisoned via a feeding tube. Everything is suitably creepy and institutional — white walls, celluloid caps, identical nurse twins. The doctors are sleazy and the nurses seem largely either wanton or mad, and there’s a sidekick (Jeremy Irvine) who is very much of the Gene Hunt school of policing. Carvel’s Dalgliesh is more Seventies sad, with cigarettes and sideburns.

Really, if you want a show that is a lot like a lot of other shows, but this time with a different top-notch actor in the middle, I expect Dalgliesh will be right up your street. But think of how much more you could do with a poet detective! You have the right to remain silent, or else I’ll get violent. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, thou art lying in a puddle of blood. Just a thought. Seems a waste.