Welcome to the world of DI Rachita Ray (Parminder Nagra), ITV’s newest cop. We meet her in the local shop choosing what to have for her tea – until a mentally disturbed man with a knife runs past and out into the square. As she runs to catch up with him, while calling in the armed response unit, he stabs a police officer. She manages to talk him into giving up the weapon without further loss of life and, as a reward, is promoted to the role of detective inspector of the homicide division. Life would be sweet for the ambitious DI if it hadn’t, over the preceding 10 minutes, shown how laced with racism it is for a person of colour at every turn.
Sometimes, they are moments of othering – the customer in the shop who assumes she is an assistant not a customer, for example – that disrupt what should be the easy flow of daily life. Sometimes, they are even larger, such as the fact that she has been overlooked for promotion until her public heroic act brings her inescapably to the attention of the top brass, and that even the promotion when it does come is tainted by apparent tokenism. “Where are you from?” her unofficial interviewer asks her after the bravery award ceremony. “Leicester,” she replies. “What’s your heritage?” he inevitably responds. Punjab on her mother’s side and Bengal on her father’s. “I think,” adds Ray. “You’re exactly what we need right now,” he says, pleased to have found the right tick for the right box.
When she turns up for her first day, the receptionist hands her a lanyard for another Asian person. The receptionist at least is abashed. Her DCI, Gemma Whelan (recently DS Sarah Collins in The Tower), is less so. Ray has been brought in to captain the investigation into a presumed CSH – “culturally specific homicide” of an Asian man (otherwise known as an “honour killing”. The term CSH was invented by the writer, but I will place good money on it being adopted force-wide within the year). How much of her animus towards Ray is fuelled by the subordinate’s “hero moment” and how much by her skin colour “allowing” her this opportunity is one of the many tangled motivations that hold the viewers’ interest.
If I’m making it sound heavy-handed by massing so many incidents together, I apologise. It’s not, at all. Despite the wealth of material writer Maya Sondhi (best known for playing police constable Maneet Bindra in Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty) doubtless has at her disposal, it is used in the service of giving us a police procedural with a fresh perspective rather than didactically. It lends heft to a story that at times moves a bit too slowly – not helped by a similar energy from Nagra that she brought to ER as Dr Rasgotra, who trailed clouds of non-specific misery behind her for six years – and feels a bit too by-numbers to stick to its own terms.
Ray has the obligatory semi-troubled private life (she’s engaged to a white fellow officer – but with reservations, as demonstrated by the ring she stows in the glove compartment before she starts work), the obligatory battle with her DCI to dig deeper into the case rather than charge the nearest subjects, and a lot of static time spent spelling out instructions and situations to underlings for the benefit of viewers (who, by this stage in our police procedural consumption history, could probably all start tomorrow without the need for any formal training).
The pace picks up as we get further into the case (it was a good decision to strip the whole thing across four nights). Ray soon suspects it is not the CSH the largely white unit had assumed it to be when presented with the death of a brown Muslim man and the disappearance of his Hindu girlfriend, but an eruption of a business rivalry between car firms (“Just shit limos for people who want to be extra,” says his former girlfriend, Nadia, in the opening episode’s best line) and a pointer to a web of underground criminal activity.
Ray ends the episode being coshed from behind, but don’t worry – I’ve looked ahead and she is soon back on her doggedly determined game and will have the whole thing wrapped up by Thursday.
