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Television & Radio
The Times March 23, 2006
Times2
Dour old Taggart mellows with age
Ian Johns
Remember when Alan Partridge was pitching programme ideas? “Shoestring, Taggart, Spender, Bergerac, Morse. What does that say to you about regional detective series?” he asked a BBC commissioning editor. “There’s too many of them?” came the reply. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is, ‘People like them, let’s make some more of them’.” Sadly, Partridge’s pitch for Swallow, a Norwich-based maverick who bends the rules to get results, wasn’t accepted.
But he was right: our love of crime shows never wanes. We are attracted to dark souls with violent instincts and twisted desires. Not to mention the criminals. If the BBC were to rework Shakespeare again, Hamlet would feature the Silent Witness team exhuming the body of the prince’s father and someone shouting: “Hang on, there’s some kind of residue in his ear. I’ll need to run some tests to confirm it but it looks like poison to me.” The whole tragedy would be wrapped up in half an hour.
Of Partridge’s roll call of cop shows, Taggart (ITV1) is still investigating Glasgow’s carrion after 23 years. Its longevity is even more impressive since it has survived the losses of its main characters: the late, memorably craggy Mark McManus in the title role, then the inspector’s teetotal sidekick found washed-up dead in the Clyde. Now the series is more of an ensemble drama with Blythe Duff, John Michie, Colin McCredie and Alex Norton jostling for close-ups in the squad room.
Last night a strangled teenager at a travelling funfair allowed McCredie to hog some of the limelight as he tried to gain the confidence of the insular staff. The already strained relationships between the surly fairground folk and suspicious locals were further exacerbated when the grandson of the travellers’ leader defied a planned marriage by marrying a Scottish lass whose widowed father was still grieving for his wife. Throw in spousal abuse, patricide, stabbings and lots of rain, and you had another dour addition to the Taggart case load.
Yet this episode suggested that the series is mellowing with age. True, it had such traditional elements as nasty chest wounds, a prime suspect as the second victim, and Norton announcing that there had been another “mordagh!” at least twice. But gone were the numerous characters being poisoned, garrotted, harpooned and barbecued in a labyrinthine plot you could never work out as the killer was a secret half-brother, abandoned foster child or illegitimate son who only appeared near the end and then died in a huge explosion. Last night’s body count totalled a mere three in 90 minutes, which left the grandson as the most likely culprit in a tiny pool of suspects — and he was. Even Norton’s pitbull of a chief inspector seemed to have abandoned his usual pop-eyed fury when anything went wrong.
The series is now like a reupholstered favourite armchair you can slump in, albeit one with suspicious stains and blood- encrusted weapons hidden down its back. While other “gritty” series have played up the urgent, in-your- face camerawork, the coppers’ personal demons and the killers’ over-complicated, Machiavellian revenge, Taggart has pulled back to become a murder mystery with no extraneous baggage. Perhaps that’s the secret of its staying power, an ability to shift from the herd while the cast give it an earthy credibility. And no other cop series has a theme tune that lends itself to playing air guitar (complete with high-pitched screechy bits). "