Ashes to Ashes II Episode Two on BBC One

All of a sudden, Ashes to Ashes is getting a bit like C4's Red Riding; why does the Police force of the eighties seem to be coming in for such stick these days?

This week, the culture clash central to the whole '21st-century-copper-back-in-time' thing brings our favourite CID team into contact with a gypsy camp, and a dead drug dealer. The dealer doesn't start off dead, but he gets that way pretty quickly, thanks to some imaginative driving by DCI Gene Hunt (Glenister). So – rather like the Life on Mars episode when he was investigated for murder – Hunt is in trouble pretty early on. Luckily for him, his mate Detective Superintendent 'Super Mac' Mackintosh (Roger Allam) is on hand to smooth everything over.

This series is getting more and more layers piled up on top of each other, and it's getting better and better to watch. The camera work is – once again – lovely (especially the scene when Hunt phones his predecessor). We're seeing a more human side of the grizzly beast we call Hunt in this series, and it's very welcome. This week he's a genuinely warm and pleasant man – at times. Some of the time he's a violent, priggish brute of a man, but that's what's so good about Gene Hunt. But most importantly, he gets involved with that corruption that's rotting the Met from the inside. It's a rot that goes deep, very deep, much deeper into the CID than might have been expected. The difference with Red Riding is that Ashes to Ashes gets to show much more of the corruption from the inside, not from the angle of outsider investigating officers or journalists.

Ashes to Ashes is very good at dropping clues that get picked up later, and this week it was good to see some clues from last week fleshed out; there's definitely a cult thing going on with Super Mac and the 'all square' blokes he keeps releasing from Hunt's Interview Room. The mystery man following Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) crops up briefly again, but we're no clearer on exactly what he wants. Fun can also be had playing 'Spot the Diana References' in this episode. I lost count of the number of times the word 'Princess' was used in connection to a car veering off the road and killing someone inside.

Drake is banging her head against a brick wall this week, trying to get to the bottom of last week's armed showdown and handle the death at the gypsy camp. On the bright side, the real world crash team are only two minutes away by the end of this week's episode – hopefully, they'll arrive before Drake goes completely potty in 1982. It'd be a shame to see her leave, in a way, because she's getting closer to Hunt and they finally seem to have a mission together this week.

But will they, or won't they? That's the question left over from Series One that still needs resolving.

Red Riding 1984 on C4

It doesn't get any better for West Yorkshire Police in the final instalment of Red Riding, this time set in 1983 with scenes from 1974 thrown in. That gangland nature and the corruption get dragged to the fore this week, as David Morrissey's Jobson becomes increasingly disillusioned. We're also given an idea of what Abu Ghraib might look like if the troops there had read Orwell's 1984, when Warren Clarke uses a caged rat as a torture device. He taunts Peter Mullan's Martin Laws with “We don't like rats!” - clearly a man who knows his Orwell.

This is a beautifully-shot episode, especially the scenes where Morrissey is smoking. There's also some nifty camera work to watch for when he first interviews Myshkin (Daniel Mays) and then again when Piggott (Mark Addy) talks to Leonard's (Gerard Kearns) girlfriend in his living room.
It's just a shame there's so much jumping about and messing with chronology. Sometimes, it's pretty tricky to work out which year we're looking at – more than once I had to wait for someone to appear whose facial hair was an indicator of which decade we were in.

But that jumping about does give a chance to point out all the little things Red Riding has been seeding through the previous two instalments, and they can bring back some of the earlier characters too. I don't want to give away the ending, because it's rather surprising, and also because I don't think I fully understand it. It could be that Red Riding leaves a lot of loose plot threads, or it just be very complicated, or just leaving a lot unspoken for us to work out ourselves.

The 1983 instalment again looks at a missing schoolgirl, this one connected to the girl in 1974 in that she went to the same school, and is later found with swan wings stitched into her back. But the man who took her is in jail, Myshkin, right? Wrong. Piggott is the slovenly solicitor given the unenviable task of appealing for the mentally-handicapped man who confessed under Police pressure in 1974. He (somewhat improbably) emerges as rather a hero, alongside Jobson, at the end.

Red Riding 1980 on C4

It's funny how good hygiene is as an indicator of character. Hygiene and good taste. You can spot the real villains of Red Riding 1980 a mile off, because one of them fails to employ good hygiene, while the other has rather poor taste in humour.
Even with the cold, distant performance of Joseph Mawle as the Yorkshire Ripper, I can't help thinking the bad guy is Bob Craven (Sean Harris), a Detective who doesn't wash his hands after using a urinal. Okay, so he manages not to touch Paddy Considine's investigating detective Hunter with his hands – demonstrating instead the 'soft' headbutt – but even so, it's not nice. Then there's that wheelbarrow joke...
Having been worried last week about the prospects for justice in 1980, it was good to see the West Yorkshire Police force band together and huddle in to protect their own this week. By 'their own' I mean their criminals as well as their coppers. In fact, the difference between the two sometimes seems to be very vague in Red Riding, which gives far more screen time to the constabulary than to the Yorkshire Ripper himself. This man is a serial killer, modelled on Jack the Ripper, yet when outside help arrives West Yorkshire Police – in the person of dirty-handed Bob Craven – are keen to point out that he is their Ripper, and they will catch him. Still, at least this is a force with pride in its villains. I suppose a strong adversary is a mark of a strong hero...maybe that's the logic best applied to the police force under such withering scrutiny in Red Riding. It's surely no coincidence that both of the first two episodes go some way to exposing corruption and gangland-style dealings within West Yorkshire's constabulary.
Note also the return of some characters from 1974 – including a somewhat altered BJ (Robert Sheehan) and his significant revelations. It's lovely the way this trilogy interacts within itself, the events that ended in last week's 'Jacobean' bloodbath continuing into this week's bloody conclusion.
Best moment of the episode (bar that final, sudden and somehow inexplicable twist) in terms of the trilogy itself? Hunter: Who would you call when a man breaks into your house, kills your dog and rapes your wife? Laws replies: Not West Yorkshire Police, because he'd already be there, wouldn't he?

Red Riding 1974 on C4

More from West Yorkshire...

This week sees the beginning of a dark and ambitious trilogy on C4. Red Riding promises to be gritty and basically 'orrible; I forget who coined the term 'Yorkshire noir', but it sounds pretty grim.

Reviews have so far made the “it's grim up north” joke to the point of overkill, so let's hope the next two films will allow reviewers to move on to other things.
1974 certainly sets a pretty grim – though I prefer 'bleak' – tone for the series which is based on a quartet of books by David Peace (what a surname for someone writing this pitch-black stuff!). It's all about the dealings of West Yorkshire Police and the Yorkshire Post – using fictional characters mostly, though apparently the higher-ranking police are based on real people. The fact that it's West Yorkshire Police makes me worry that my life is becoming dominated by that place, as my last blog post was about West Yorkshire Playhouse. Thankfully, Othello was a rather more pleasant experience...and it's not often you get to say that.

Being set in 1974, and having young men floating about being policemen and journalists, this was bound to feel a bit like Life on Mars. In parts, it does, though I gather director Julian Jarrold tried to avoid that.

"We went for a colour we all associate with the Seventies, which is slightly brownish and muted. What I didn't want to do was to go down the Life on Mars route and plaster it with pop songs of the periods."

he says in The Independent. Really? Well, full marks on the brownish tint conjuring a seventies feel, but if you wanted to avoid 'the Life on Mars route', maybe you shouldn't have given your central character a leather jacket almost identical to Sam Tyler's... Also, what is it about the muted brown stuff that make us think of the seventies? Surely, colour existed back then in much the same way it does now? But then, the trailer for next week's film (set in 1980) has an entirely different colour quality to it – much brighter, with more contrast between black and white.
That Independent article is also one that mentions the 'Jacobean' ending...and Jacobean it certainly is – brilliantly so.

Fresh from failure on Fleet Street – though not exactly fresh-faced – Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) is investigating the disappearance and later murder of a little girl who never made it home from school. During his highly professional investigation, he somehow gets his end away three times in the space of roughly half an hour – with two different women. One of them – Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall) – is the mother of a missing girl, and turns out to be real trouble for the poor lad.

Dunford soon regrets laughing at his mate's fears about the Police 'death squads'. Barry (Anthony Flanagan) is obviously just being paranoid...until a sheet of glass flies from a lorry and slices his head off. Hmm, suspicious. It seems these Policemen really are as nasty as Barry thought. In fact, West Yorkshire Police come out of this pretty badly. They're corrupt and violent, and possibly a tad inept.

If you didn't already have a bleak impression of West Yorkshire, you probably will after Red Riding, which may be the intention, but I'm not convinced. From the bigotry of Sean Bean's brutal businessman to the general grubbiness of the council estates, it's not exactly pro-Yorkshire...unless you happen think this is quintessential Yorkshire. It isn't. Then there's the all-too-familiar black bag over the head of a man held prisoner by men in uniform. Okay, he's not a Jihadist held by US military forces in Abu Ghraib, no. He's a British reporter held by West Yorkshire Police in an underground cell near the moorland they chuck him into from the back of a lorry. So that's better, then.

It's not looking good for justice in the rest of the series.