Harry Wild is set in Dublin, which means the main attraction for many viewers will be location spotting rather than the plot. And that may be a good thing, because let’s just say the script leaves a little to be desired.
It stars Jane Seymour as the retired literary professor of the title (her full name is Harriet) who solves murders in that charming but amateurish way so beloved of cosy detective fiction, stepping on the toes of her garda detective son in the process. Presumably all future episodes will end with mum giving junior new variations on the “if only you’d listened to me all along” speech.
In this first episode, it’s the murder of a homeless man and the disappearance of an aspiring actress, which Seymour knows instinctively to be connected to an obscure Elizabethan play, but no one takes notice.
“You have no experience investigating a crime,” declares her son. “You’re just seeing what you want to see.” To which she retorts: “You can’t be that obtuse, I gave birth to you.”
We’re meant to think that no one listens to her because she’s a woman of a certain age who should be doing “old lady stuff” rather than poking her nose in when it’s not wanted.
Actually they’re just annoyed with her because she’s very, very annoying.
The case, such as it was, didn’t amount to very much, but it was the tone of the show which was really baffling. It had the feel of a light-hearted mid-afternoon mystery show, together with the quirky characters and local colour of a series like Midsomer Murders, but it went out at 9.35pm, which would lead one to expect something darker.
Take out the swearing and the references to vibrators, and there’d be nothing here that wouldn’t feel appropriate to a family-friendly Miss Marple or Murder She Wrote-type mystery, while her rascally teenage sidekick seemed to have come straight from kids’ TV.
The comic touches also felt weirdly out of place, not least when the killer, having been unmasked by Wild, admitted to a spot of cannibalism with the corpse of a previous victim with the words: “I couldn’t get enough of those samosas. I actually planned to do some pasties too, but she wasn’t a big woman.” There’s nothing wrong with dark humour, but the show didn’t commit to the mood enough to make the pay-off feel earned.
The most likely audience of elderly Agatha Raisin fans will be getting ready for an early night, while those settling down to binge detective drama will surely be after something meatier – no offence intended to those samosas.
Some might say there is no need for another prime time show about couples hunting for desirable property in the countryside.
There’s already Location, Location, Location, after all. And Escape to the Country. And A Place in the Sun. And A Place by the Sea. Well, you get the point,
These people would, however, be wrong. The truth is that you can’t have too many shows about people’s “search for a new life” far from the hustle and bustle of cities; and on the evidence of the opening episode, Bog Amach (nice pun in the title, by the way) looks like a welcome addition to the genre. It even has the novelty of being in Irish.
First out of the blocks were Don and Will, who were hoping to flee Dublin for a place in Connemara with enough land to start a glamping business, all for under €300,000.
The pair made for the ideal househunters, because they basically fell for everything they saw. “It’s gorgeous, I love it,” said Brazilian Will, stepping into a cottage that was such a wreck it would make most people’s hearts sink.
Bubbling with positivity, they only saw potential, not even being put off by the curious case of the mobile home encased in a shell of local stone, which isn’t something you see every day (probably for a good reason).
Eventually they ended up buying somewhere on an island in Lough Ree in Co Westmeath, so far off the original brief that one could hardly blame the programme makers for not finding them the ideal home. Now that’s what I call a plot twist.
British-Iraqi computer engineer Saad al-Hilli, his dentist wife Iqbal, and her mother Suhaila al-Allaf, were all murdered in their car by an unknown gunman in the Alps in 2012.
The couple’s seven-year-old daughter, Zainab, was shot and savagely beaten but survived. Her younger sister, four-year-old Zeena, managed to hide under the skirt of her dead mother, where incredibly she wasn’t discovered for eight hours.
With French police saying earlier this year that they are finally close to solving the case, Murder in the Alps offered another chance to look again at this shocking but endlessly fascinating crime, which also claimed the life of a French cyclist who was shot nearby.
Everything about the case was bewilderingly odd. There were rumours that Saad was a spy, linked to Saddam Hussein. Iqbal’s former husband died thousands of miles away in America on the very same day, apparently of a heart attack though some of his family suspect poisoning.
From the start French police were convinced that the answer lay somewhere in the family’s past, and that the cyclist was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Only later did they reveal that it might be the other way round.
Murder in the Alps was an engrossing three-part documentary, but regrettably focused too heavily on those earlier red herrings rather than the subsequent developments. It left the whole thing feeling a little unbalanced.
But as true crime documentaries go, there was more than enough here to keep the most demanding viewer hooked.
