Bloodlands, BBC 1 Sunday and iPlayer
Multiple bodies secretly buried, a cover up of killings to protect the peace process and the abduction of a former IRA leader turned to crime.
We’ve had crime drama set in Northern Ireland before but none that has been so specifically set in a post-Troubles world.
Jimmy Nesbitt stars as Tom Brannick, a character you’ve seen many times. A good hearted, ageing cop whose investigative methods are on the edge but he’s trying his best to get the bad guys while being obstructed by politicking senior brass.
It opens with Brannick called as the car of missing haulage boss and former IRA leader Pat Keenan is pulled from Strangford Lough.
Taped to the wing mirror is a picture of one of the Harland and Wolff cranes, nicknamed Goliath. Brannick thinks that a killer operating at the time of the Good Friday Agreement is back.
‘Goliath’ killed loyalists and republicans he/she believed were impediments to the peace process and seemed to have intelligence service connections.
However, the killer, who hasn’t been heard of in more than two decades, also inexplicably killed Brannick’s wife Emma, a military intelligence officer.
Why would Goliath return to kill Keenan or is somebody playing Brannick?
He calls his commanding officer, an old friend, who orders him to forget Goliath and find Keenan before republicans’ distrust of the PSNI deepens. It does so quickly after Brannick visits Keenan's wife and breaks into her husband’s office while pretending to be looking for the toilet (lesson one in TV detective school).
So angry are the IRA that they petrol-bomb a thin-skinned police car outside the local police station, setting an officer on fire.
Brannick is on hand to smother out the flames with his own jacket, remarking later in TV cop cool, that it may smell of burn but it cost him that much that he’s going to keep wearing it.
We got through an awful lot in the first episode (of four).
By the end, Keenan is found safe and well, protected in a locked hotel bedroom by a hoax explosive device.
Three bodies are found in an unmarked grave on an island in Strangford Lough, including that of Brannick’s wife.
The remains are discovered after a forgotten eyewitness statement is found in the file, where a farmer gives a precise location on an island directly in front of her land where she witnessed a burial.
Remote bogs in the border lands were the favourite hiding places for republican dirty secrets, not flat islands in a middle of a lough visible from the shore.
It also seems a bit unlikely that a police officer would be involved in a dig where his own wife’s remains are found.
Nonetheless, Nesbitt gives his usual convincing performance and Bloodlands (produced by Jed Mercurio of Line of Duty) will satisfy the crime drama addicts.
Credit is due also for tackling policing and the peace process, which undoubtedly will attract criticism for being too favourable to one side or the other.
Unfortunately, I struggled to retain my entire focus on the drama, breaking off repeatedly to play the games of spot the location and the actor.
Television may be losing the ratings war to YouTube but we still all return to child like excitement when we see somewhere we recognise on TV.
Before you know where you are, a bizarre competition develops where you point at the TV and shout the name of the place, delighted at being first.
The other game in a homegrown drama is spotting the actors. The Derry Girls connections were obvious but who expected Jock from the Young Offenders (one of TV’s great characters) to turn up as a Belfast cop?
