Vigil, BBC 1, Sunday and iPlayer
Vigil, which completed its six-week run this week, is the television equivalent of Twitter.
It’s interesting at first, it seems new, there’s lots happening and various extraordinary things are attracting your attention, but ultimately it’s entirely without substance.
To be fair though, as Twitter has shown, there’s an audience for this kind of stuff and Vigil gathered them in.
Its viewing figures have been high enough to mark it down as the BBC’s most watched drama of the year, which isn’t bad given the amount the state broadcaster produces.
In the final episode this week, the whodunnit was answered.
It was the Russians, which presumably signals that the world has come full circle back to the 1980s, but then the Taliban don’t have access to nuclear submarines.
When we left it last week, our hero DCI Silva (Suranne Jones) was locked in a missile silo in the Vanguard class submarine with water filling it as she waited to be launched into the ocean.
That the latest Bond movie launched this week is presumably a coincidence.
She came to be in this unlikely position after a sailor was murdered on the boat and she was flown out to investigate. Her request for the sub to return to port was refused because Vigil was on duty as the UK’s moving nuclear deterrent.
It got a bit busy after that. Silva, who had so many theories that one had to be right eventually, blamed, at various points, the second in command of the boat, another crewman, and the chef.
She suspected the chief engineer was involved and sniffed out that the doctor was having an affair with the coxswain.
There were a further two murders on board after she arrived, a collection of attempted murders, and she was briefly detained after the captain believed she was not in sound mind.
DCI Silva suffers from depression and does not have custody of her stepdaughter. Additionally, she is claustrophobic after her fiancé was killed when he accidentally drove into a lake with Silva and daughter Poppy.
Still, with the help of her sometimes girlfriend and police colleague back on dry land, they got there in the end.
A Russian intelligence agent had infiltrated an anti-nuclear camp near the port and recruited a submariner to his cause. He also murdered one of the campaigners, who was the secret daughter of the local MP.
The Russians organised the murders, smuggled Sarin gas on board, damaged the boat’s nuclear engine, sabotaged its communications and risked sinking it in an effort to force it to surface.
And strangely for a whodunnit there was almost no opportunity to spot the villain.
It was Doward, a sonar operator, whom we had barely seen since he replaced the original murder victim Craig Burke.
While willing to murder repeatedly and risk nuclear war between Russia and Britain, Doward was a surprisingly easy nut to crack in the interview room.
Threatened with isolation in prison he sang like a canary and explained the whole plot in the last couple of minutes, which was a lucky break for the writers.
****
The Ryder Cup, Sky Sports Ryder Cup, Sunday
A tearful Rory McIlroy apologising for not winning will probably be in most television highlights packages of the year.
Ireland’s greatest golfer cuts a sorrowful figure on the course these days.
His appears to have lost that intangible ability to perform when it matters most and the Darwinian nature of high-level sport is crushing him.
It is the viewer and the player knowing what he is capable of that makes his emotional apology so touching.
We can only wish this honest man fortitude and bravery and hope he recovers his quintessence of greatness.
