Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
TV’S least likely cop duo
GRANITE HARBOUR FRIDAYS, BBC1
★★★
I predict that soon every city in the UK will have its own cop show. And that it will feature an awkward pair of professional partners sitting in their squad cars, staking out the local drug overlords/pimps/psycho billionaires/bent coppers while living on a diet of acerbic one-liners.
All the big/telegenic/interesting/ dirty cities have already been taken. Blue Lights and The Fall in Belfast, Morse/endeavour/in Oxford, Rebus in Edinburgh, DCI Banks in Leeds, Scott & Bailey in Manchester, Inspector George Gently in Newcastle – and let’s not get started on London. However, the time has surely come for second-tier cities to have a shot, too; ones that not everyone can instantly identify via dreaming
I could warm to the show if it warmed to itself a bit more
spires, bridges and skyscrapers. Step up, Stoke! Come on down, Derby!
Which brings me to the second series of Aberdeen’s Granite Harbour, starring arguably TV’S most improbable cop pairing: feisty DCI Lara ‘Bart’ Bartlett (Hannah Donaldson, Shetland) and Jamaican former military policeman Davis Lindo (Romario Simpson, Small Axe).
As a snappy dresser and a member of the 2.6 per cent of Aberdeen’s population with Afro-caribbean heritage, Lindo (above, with Bartlett) is probably the detective least likely to fade into a background of unremitting coastal gloom. The city may be rich – it’s the offshore oil capital of Europe – and have a harbour and an international school, but it’s hardly Palma de Mallorca.
Though his chances of being sent undercover are slim, Lindo compensates by going ‘overcover’ and in the first episode of this three-parter that includes running around a Norwegian container ship uninvited, looking for clues to the disappearance of an Iranian stowaway whose pregnant wife suspects he’s been murdered.
I could warm to Granite Harbour if only it warmed to itself a bit more. The robo-dialogue is brisk and chilly – pregnant Mariam’s ‘I chose to burn my scarf, show my hair and dance in defiance of a tyrannical regime’ speech should be moving, but (and this is no fault of actress Afsaneh Dehrouyeh, who is one of the best things in the show) it sounds less like a desperate Iranian and more like AI.
GH tries to shield its small-city mores by pretending to be bigger
and swingier: yet the fact that the town’s steely female drugs kingpin, Grace Mcfadden, was in the same school year as DCI Cora Macmillan (Dawn Steele, Holby City) is just a little bit too neat. Meanwhile, those loving, lingering shots of signs saying ‘Aberdeen International Airport’ and ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’ only exacerbate the disconnect between the city’s justifiable civic pride and its granite-grey reality. So, come on, Coventry! Hurry up, Hull!