The Jetty starts badly. There is a podcaster explaining the premise via a portentous voiceover (“I chase the darkness for a living”), a man and a can of accelerant silhouetted against the flames of a burning boathouse, and a painfully named heroine – detective constable Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman), recently widowed – being woken in the night and creeping round the house in search of an intruder, though we all know this is bound to be a false alarm (her daughter Hannah is sneaking a cigarette out the back). Our scene is set in a tightknit community in a fictional northern town. So far, so deeply uninspired BBC thriller.
But after this unpromising start, The Jetty becomes not only a very good thriller, but an unexpectedly attentive meditation on what it means to move as a woman through a world that is suffused with male violence in all its myriad forms. Some of them brutal, more of them insidious, embedded, rendered all but invisible by history and silent acceptance, and all the more powerful for that.
