Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Simm’s cop is UTTERLY COMPELLING
SUNDAYS, ITV1 ★★★★
Back in the summer of 2020, I recall excited local social media chat (we hadn’t got out much, you’ll recall) when John Simm was spotted filming in St Leonards-on-sea, where I live. The result was Grace, which aired the next spring – with my town standing in for Brighton & Hove. Yet this time round I couldn’t spot any of my local haunts in the first featurelength episode of the crime drama’s fourth series; it’s now filmed 37 miles to the west, actually in Brighton.
Yet despite finding itself a comfortable berth in the ITV schedules, Grace has also been slightly overlooked, I think... and not least by me. Unusual, because I’m nothing if not a Simm fan. So let’s put that right. Originally adapted from Peter James’s novels by Russell Lewis (who wrote the Morse prequel, Endeavour, which it occasionally resembles), Grace features a titular lead character whose detective career is on the wane, relegated to Cold Cases after his wife Sandy mysteriously disappeared a few years previously. She’s definitely not dead; we occasionally see her wandering around Brighton looking stricken. However, after three series we’re just rolling as Sandy’s story unfolds, ever so slowly. Meanwhile, Roy Grace is now in a relationship with Cleo (Zoe Tapper), who’s pregnant.
However, it’s his day job – the catching of local crims – that’s the main plot driver; Cleo and indeed Sandy only pop up on the domestic periphery of Roy’s life. In this, Grace feels a bit old-fashioned – the best contemporary crime dramas (think Happy Valley) tend to mix the personal and professional, as most of us do. Compartmentalisation is, happily, largely for the wholly unreconstructed coppers of the past, as per (arguably) Simm’s greatest hit, Life On Mars.
In this first of the new series, Roy was swiftly on the scene after a violent robbery. However, the victim’s subsequent death and the discovery that a vintage watch worth millions was also missing took us on a wholly unexpected, twisty journey. Soon we were flashbacked to 1960s London (looking like a violent Call The Midwife), en route to a busy denouement, involving code-cracking! (And guns! And tunnels! And skeletons!), plus a too-neat (and this isn’t really a
spoiler) ‘sorry-for-everything-i’veever-done’ exposition by Robert Glenister – who seems to be on TV every week at the moment – that never, ever happens in real life.
Grace is entertaining, yet its parochialism, and a script veering between pacy and wasteful, jars a little. When a soon-to-be-assaulted victim says, ‘Oh, I thought you were checking the water pressure…’ or a character deploys clunky codpsychology (‘he’ll never stop seeking his [father’s] approval…’), the sum of all the parts feels not so much Graceful as clumsy. Throughout, however, Simm, one of our finest TV actors, remains as watchable as ever.
1960s London was like a violent Call The Midwife