One useful guide as to whether any given contemporary British television drama is worth watching is to see if Roger Allam is in it. If the show is mediocre he will make it more palatable, as with Endeavour and Game of Thrones, and if the rest of it is great he will help render it sublime, as with latter series ofThe Thick of It, and the radio show he does with Joanna Lumley, Conversations from a Long Marriage. He’s in demand at the moment, which is a good thing, but you rather wonder whether producers are just “reaching for the Allam” in the way that inadequate cooks reach for the Schwartz jar of mixed herbs and throw a handful into whatever doomed concoction is disintegrating before their very senses on the hob. Well, I speak for myself.
With his grumpy but civilised and ineffably upper-middle-class manner, Allam infuses any role fortunate to have found him like a blend of Chris Patten and those much missed late actors Geoffrey Palmer and Robert Stephens. The role of Judge Antoine Verlaque in these adaptions of the ML Longworth could almost have been created for Allam. He’s a sophisticated soul from a rich family of grain merchants with an eye for fine art and spotting the flaw in a wrong ’un’s alibi. The series is set in gorgeous Aix-en-Provence, and the judge is not unlike a French Inspector Morse. They’ve even given him a nice classic Citroen DS to cruise around in, like Morse’s Jaguar.
