Grantchester
ITV
★★★★☆
One Child
BBC Two
★★★☆☆
James Norton, the smouldering sex icon, stripping off and diving into a river. James Norton, the dead-eyed psycho rapist. There were shades of War & Peace and Happy Valley in the returning Grantchester last night as the good Reverend Sidney Chambers first took a lunchtime bathe in unreasonably tight shorts and was then accused of sexual assault by a teenage girl.
Soon the dog collar was back on and the charges thrown out after an aggressive interrogation. Yet ITV’s reliably enjoyable crime drama had rapidly re-established its ability to cloak grim realities in cuddly, familiar trappings.
Its leads continued to be believably fallible — Sidney, still tormented by his wartime experiences and romantic disappointments; DI Geordie Keating (Robson Green), still bigoted and thuggish, yet with a twinkly charm, like a 1950s Gene Hunt. (Green’s transformation into a serious actor of note, by the way, is matched only by that of Neil Morrissey, here playing the unfortunate girl’s father with anger and menace. And did you spot Morrissey lurking in Sunday’s The Night Manager?) The case exposed familiar crimes within the church as the crimes of the culprit, an old colleague of Sidney’s, began to be covered up by their superiors.
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“Even those bearing unspeakable burdens, we cannot turn our backs on them,” Sidney announced to his congregation as he was forced to concede his friend’s guilt. As the story rushed to a slightly unsatisfactory conclusion, I wondered whether the issues it raised were too complex to be adequately addressed in an ITV hour. But it was well worth a try.
There were fewer concerns with One Child, which had three hours to delve into the institutional and moral corruption of modern China and did a comprehensive job. Yet even the writer Guy Hibbert’s finest dramas, such as Complicit or Five Minutes of Heaven, can be hamstrung by their desperation to address issues at the expense of rounded characters. Too many tend to deliver their speeches from soap boxes rather than engage in nuanced dialogue. One Child wasn’t quite up to those standards and was prone to sacrificing a scalpel for a spade.
At its best, though, it was very affecting. Mei (Katie Leung, who grew into the role after an uncertain start) returned to her birthplace of Guangzhou to help free her brother Ajun (Sebastian So), wrongly convicted of murder. It ended — after a series of increasingly bizarre, desperate and horrible scenes — in tragedy. Ajun was executed in the most shabby way imaginable: given a lethal injection in a car park. Such a sickening, unsentimental climax was infinitely preferable to the many cop-outs that less determined series might have resorted to.
The sense of place, too, was as tangible as the sense of outrage, and this ferocious conviction carried it over the line. The human drama at the centre came through despite the tub-thumping and hand-wringing, but it was an honestly intended and often unsettling series.