THE CRITICS
TELEVISION
After the
harvest
Rachel Cooke
Forensics: The Real CSI
BBC Two
You can see why the BBC has subtitled its
much-trailed new series about forensic sci-
entists “The Real CSI”, and not “The Real
Silent Witness”. The former, an American
show, sounds exciting and vaguely plau-
sible, whereas the latter, the BBC’s own
long-running forensics drama, makes one
think only of its ultra-beige star, Emilia Fox,
wandering around unconvincingly in her
paper mask and all-in-one white suit. But
still, there’s no getting away from it. Fo-
rensics: The Real CSI (1 May, 9pm) is Silent
Witness minus its neatness, decorum and
carefully polite dialogue. It’s so dreadfully
real, and because of this it squeezes at the
heart even when events turn out, as they of-
ten do, to be anticlimatic. Here are Geordie
accents, nondescript offices and blood that
is brown-black rather than red. Here are
families destroyed in as long as it takes to
open a front door. Here, in other words,
are snapshots of Britain in all its muddle
and misery.
We are among the men and women of the
Northumbria Police. The first episode fol-
lowed two cases, both in Newcastle. On a
housing estate, a woman had been injured
following a shooting at her home, a possible
warning to her boyfriend who was to ap-
pear as a witness in a criminal trial; and in a
disordered terraced house, a 50-something
white male had been found face down be-
neath his desk, the victim of what looked
at first like a stabbing. The police officers
talked of “the harvest”: the gathering of
forensic material that must be completed in
the first minutes and hours after they arrive
at a crime scene. The forensic pathologist,
who is called Nigel Cooper and who has a
face that reminds me just a little of Sherlock
Holmes as played by Basil Rathbone, talked
of how he had to resist the temptation to
move a body immediately to a mortuary:
some secrets may only be revealed while a
person lies where they were found. More
movingly, once the body was on a gurney
and he was standing beside it, ruler in hand,
he talked of the privilege involved in his
job. Post-mortems are inevitably stressful:
so many people standing by, waiting for
answers to impossible questions. Never-
theless, at the centre of all this, there is, for
him, quietude – a state born of the fact that
Hard facts: Forensics follows two real-life cases
a body, with its scars and wrinkles and tat-
toos, tells the story of a whole life.
Watching a series like this is chastening,
a reminder that even those police dramas
that aim most determinedly for veracity
are dreadful fakes: sleek where they should
be rough, glib where they should be un-
fathomable. The police found a suspect in
the shooting, but having too little forensic
evidence – what it amounted to was some
DNA on a mislaid cartridge – they could
not secure the prosecution they needed.
Statistically, knife wounds are usually not
self-inflicted, but the man known to us
only as Jan had killed himself with an in-
jury to his neck; the trail of blood the police
found in every room of his home spoke of
the agonisingly long time it had taken him
to die. “Loneliness must have driven him to
it,” said his father, who had found his son’s
body. Television is as hooked on motive
as it is on character, but here were neither:
Jan was, for us, an absence; a blurry face on
a single photograph. Why was he lonely?
And why had no one noticed this? We were
not told, perhaps because no one had any
answer worth giving.
Swabs, measurements, microscopes – the
science is interesting enough, if you’re able
to understand it (an explanation of the “re-
fractive index” of glass was a bit beyond my
capacities, alas). But the true interest of this
series lies, for me, in the gaping contrast be-
tween what we think we know about crime,
and its quotidian realities. Without excep-
tion, the officers who talked to camera – and
even to their bosses via their radios – spoke
with a matter-of-fact calmness that was at
once both reassuring and slightly unnerv-
ing. What is to us replete with thrills (at
least when it is mediated through the pens
of Jed Mercurio et al) is to them just a job:
one that requires meticulousness more
than imagination, and desk-bound stoicism
more than a taste for car chases and other
high drama. l
RADIO
The really
mild show
Antonia Quirke
Hugo Rifkind’s Search for Power
BBC Radio 4
The Times columnist Hugo Rifkind’s new
three-part satirical series, about who in
modern Britain has power (3 May, 11:30am
– episode one is about MPs), makes use of a
very specific Radio 4 form: the pre-scripted
monologue recorded in front of a studio
audience, delivered in a manner that looks
for laughs but isn’t trying overly hard for
them. It sprinkles in a few recorded inter-
views – like slides, or props. “You may have
noticed that, lately, MPs haven’t been doing
what they’re told,” says Rifkind, lightly.
The whole thing is done at a supremely
mild level. He’s not expecting us to bust a
gut. So you don’t get any of that exhausting,
up-and-down magic-show tension that
you get listening to a Jerry Sadowitz. There
was one roar, at a joke about Facebook. “It’s
like a cocktail party that exists inside your
computer and someone’s invited loads and
loads of racists”. And a little gasp at former
Conservative chief whip Andrew Mitchell’s
deathlessly pithy phrase: “The whips are
not moral or immoral; they are amoral.”
Generally, there’s an underlying mirth-
lessness to the scripted comedy lecture.
It’s a form that has served lots of not-quite
comedians very well over the last 15 years
(see Mark Steel). As a rule, they disguise
their lack of comedy chops by massively
intensifying their political commitments
and feeding off the bonhomie of their audi-
ence (see Mark Thomas). The whole thing
can be worthwhile, if you have a mind
as alert as the late Jeremy Hardy or Jon
Ronson. But more often it can sound like
the American late night talk show mono-
logue of a John Oliver – obvious, hectoring,
smug. Rifkind’s approach is much lower-
temperature, less obviously like a revival
meeting, and he’s smart, compassionate
company. His conclusion was infinitely
melancholy. “It’s hard work, to work out
how powerful MPs are, when that’s literally
what everybody has been fighting about for
the past two years.” The episode was doubt-
less conceived and commissioned before
the last six months caused the reputation of
MPs to take a further, disastrous nosedive.
And as such, it all seemed a little inappro-
priately… whimsical: it didn’t sound quite
May 2019 to me. But next week’s episode,
on journalists, ought to have more fizz. l
3-9 MAY 2019 | NEW STATESMAN | 55
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