Granite Harbour review – the best dressed cop double-act in TV history

by 24britishtvDec. 2, 2022, 9 p.m. 28
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Without wishing to get too Taggart about this, there’s been a murder. The body of energy company executive Clellan Coburn has been found in the woods outside Aberdeen, and he had just announced a business merger that would have meant his oil company switching to green energy. Whodunnit? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, probably not the guy at the public announcement shouting: “I’m going to kill you Clellan!”

But Granite Harbour (BBC One) isn’t just a serendipitously topical if formulaic thriller in the era of Just Stop Oil. Rather, it’s an odd-couple police procedural about the dressiest crime solvers in all of Police Scotland’s history. In the first episode DCI Lara Bartlett (Hannah Donaldson) accessorises a Breton fisherman’s striped top with rakishly tied red neckerchief, steely blue eyes and a bob, while – not to be outdone – rookie detective Davis Lindo (Romario Simpson) sports a retina-frying pink shirt with matching tie over a sharp suit and camel coat.

I can’t see either of them getting into a dumpster to hunt for clues, but can well imagine them getting quite testy if the victim’s blood spatter gets on their threads. The biggest mystery is how they are going to find the killer with that kind of attitude.

The three-part drama offers what hopefully amounts to the final twist on the venerable buddy-cop double act. Every other permutation has been tried. We’ve had artisanal beer connoisseur partnered with orange juice-drinking barbarian (Morse and Lewis), believer versus rational sceptical (Mulder and Scully), tough ambitious black woman cop from the big city and small-town anorak-wearing white male geek (McDonald and Dodds), even cop and crime-solving dog (Turner and Hooch).

Granite Harbour tips the proverbial tam o’shanter to these forebears with its pairing of a sassy Aberdonian with authority issues and a disarmingly accented Jamaican outsourced to the greyest corner of the United Greydom, poor chap. They’re an odd couple but will they be mixing wardrobes before the denouement? I wouldn’t put it past them.

Naturally, it’s former military police Lindo one feels for. He has left Jamaica with some foreshadowed issues to do with his dad as part of a Commonwealth diversity retraining scheme, which sounds so ridiculous it probably isn’t made up. Even the decor of Lindo’s new flat is grey, a style crime even Scottish law enforcers can’t investigate. Worse, he manages to affront the only other person of colour in his professional ambit on day one. “You think I got here because of some diversity scheme?” snarls Bhav Joshi’s DI Jaiyush Malick when they meet. “I meant no offence sir,” replies Lindo. “No? Well tons taken,” snaps Malick, laughable as the unremittingly chippy coworker . It’s one of the many cliched moves in writer Sarah Deane’s plodding plod drama.

Simpson, who played Lizard in the beautiful Lovers Rock episode of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, is an endearing presence on Aberdeen’s mean streets. He’s not the only person of colour in this colour-drained burg, it is true, but one who faces the episode’s greatest challenge when a waitress presents him with the biggest Scottish breakfast in the history of Scottish breakfasts. My arteries are furring even as I write about its insane concatenation of kippers, black pudding and other fried items.

Back to the murder. The suspect list is longer than Hercule Poirot’s on the Orient Express. As far as I can tell, the only people not in the frame are those who spent the autumn dangling from gantries above the M25 or gluing themselves to old masters. Half of Aberdeen, we are to suppose, has an interest in continued oil production. Then there’s Clellan’s brother Shay, who opposes the merger.

Quite possibly so does Karolina Andersson (Katia Winter), the glamorous businesswoman from Stavanger, where she presided over the Norwegian oil capital’s transition to renewables. By merging her firm with Cullen’s, she plans to do the same in Scotland.

Is she a green goddess or fortune-hunting Jezebel? Let’s hope the latter. Clellan, we learn, bequeathed all his worldly goods to Karolina in a will he suspiciously amended a month before his death. She, of all the murder suspects currently in the Aberdeen area, has the strongest motive for wishing him dead.

But do the cops spend the opening episode giving this imperious Scandinavian their best good cop/bad cop routine in the interview room? Of course not. Instead, we see Davis engaged in a foot race to catch the troubled man who uttered the death threat.

Police never accuse themselves of wasting police time, but in this case they should. After all, the fleeing Scotsman is clearly something that used to be common in this part of the world – a red herring.

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