Above Suspicion

It’s rare enough that we see a prime time British drama with a strong female cast about modern women. It’s just depressing that invariably, those dramas and those women tend to be almost exclusively about ignored professionals in a sexist environment, and tired prostitutes battered to death on filthy canal paths.

This recent ITV1 drama is not where you’ll find the exception to the rules: on screen, a young female officer, keen to prove herself beyond her father’s name, simply doesn’t turn up to a muddy murder scene in a sexy killer heels, short skirt and pristine white blouse combo. Except here, where we also have alpha male cops throwing brawls in a mortuary. Frankly, it feels like someone writing in the style of Lynda La Plante, with not quite enough of her style. It's annoying then to discover that the writer is in fact the great lady herself.

Above Suspicion is admittedly very slickly made with a certain savage gloss, although the plotting can sometimes falter: there’s an extraordinarily clumsy early clue chucked into proceedings with all the subtlety and grace of a murder victim being chucked into a canal. In addition, there’s a somewhat irritating habit of police procedural photographs morphing into scenes involving them before they’ve died: presumably, this is an attempt to cash in on the CSI motif, but here it lacks logic - if those photos actually exist, then finding the killer should be easy: you just seek out the person taking hi-def digital photos of the victims moments before they’re attacked. Obviously, the makers would will you to suspend disbelief, but the effort needs to go both ways.

It is difficult to see who’d want this on a shiny disc to watch again and again - there’s enough grim and grisly scenes of death and torture to make this genuinely tough viewing. Despite the fact that this is aimed at precisely the sort of ITV audience who’d normally avoid modern horror movies, in essence, this is Saw IV for the Songs Of Praise crowd.

That said, there’s some great performances here in what could be strictly one note roles, particularly Eden Lake's Kelly Reilly as Anna Travis and Jason Durr as the object of her investigation.



Released on DVD on 4th January 2010 by Acorn Media.

Written by Andrew Allen.