‘Bravo Oscar One, receiving,” sighs Ross Kemp. “Understood. On my way.” Wearily, he puts his motor into gear and pulls away slowly, doing his best to skew TV-cop response times so they resemble real ones.
Kemp plays Tony, a washed-up, soon-to-be-divorced, possibly corrupt detective, who one night is summoned to an incident on a council estate. There has been, without getting too Taggart about this, a murder.
But Kemp’s tired eyes suggest to me a more compelling story. He would rather be making forbiddingly butch documentaries, chest bumping with Chechen warlords or diving for gems, than trying to find something like plausible motivation in this stereotype of a burned-out case in a by-numbers police procedural.
Tony is an ex-Met detective with “a past” – not a fun past, like Simon Pegg’s in Hot Fuzz, but one that has cost him his career, his marriage and, presumably, his hair. Now, he has to work in the provinces, like a plonker.
All the spunk and vim that Kemp brought to his performance as half of the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders, sortin’ aahhttt assorted muppets and bad ’uns while wearing T-shirts that suggested an overfamiliarity with his gym’s weights section, are over. He is a plod in more ways than one.
That said, Blindspot starts promisingly. Before the opening credits, we are plunged into a night-time chase through an estate. Our heroine, Hannah, a wheelchair user, is trying to elude a baseball-bat-wielding stereotype in a skeleton face mask. As face masks go, it’s up there with the one in Scream for indicating that the wearer is not someone your mum would invite round for cucumber sandwiches.
This off-the-peg psychopath is such a cliche that, whenever there is a pause in the action, he cracks his neck on both sides. Hannah escapes, but not before witnessing him beat a young woman to death for reasons unclear. My early theories are that the murder is the result of a drug turf war or social-media-inspired misogynistic vigilantism. Or both.
Blindspot is at its most interesting when it focuses on its characters with disabilities. Hannah can swerve a speeding psychopath, while her hearing-impaired colleague can read lips. Given that they work at a company where they watch livestreamed footage from CCTV cameras for criminal activity, the second skill is handy, certainly if you want to know what drug dealers are saying to each as they monopolise the swings. The blind spot of the title refers to the darkened corners beyond CCTV coverage, where killers drag their victims, but no doubt alludes to society’s undervaluing of disabled people.
Cut to a year later. Tony and his inept colleagues have failed to solve the crime, even though Hannah told them what she saw, right down to the dragon tattoo on the killer’s wrist. Then, one day, Hannah is sitting at a bank of CCTV screens when she spots a suspicious adult sitting on a playground swing. He looks up, stares at Hannah and guess what? He is wearing a skeleton mask. Is this the murderer, telling Hannah he knows where she works and that she is next on his kill list, because she witnessed the murder? It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
On another night, Hannah thinks she sees him again. On one screen, a man drags a woman towards a stairwell beyond the reach of surveillance. Minutes later, he emerges alone. Has he killed her? If so, why? Or was Hannah mistaken? And why are the police so hopeless at investigating her crime report? Is it because they are part of the crime wave they are notionally trying to break? This theory gains credibility when we see Tony fingering an envelope of £50 notes.
If I know my cop show tropes, though, this is an episode-one red herring. My money says Tony will find professional redemption and new love, possibly with Hannah (although he is old enough to be her grandad) or with the sexy council leader, Louisa.
The series title may allude to another blind spot. When Louisa installs cameras on the estate, to combat crime and to win her the votes she needs to secure re-election, she seems to have lost the political plot. Has she not seen the opening credits of The Wire, in which a drug slinger destroys a security camera with a brick? Human problems don’t always have technological solutions.
• Blindspot aired on Channel 5 and is available on My5.
