Crime and passion create The Fall’s perfect storm

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

There are times when you wonder if The Fall is a crime drama or a chance for the two main stars to smoulder into the cameras.

It’s gripping for sure – and sometimes even in the way that the makers intended – but honestly, it took a series and a half to see Detective Stella Gibson in uniform while every other week she was in her silk nightie or swimming costume.

Gillian Anderson is clearly a woman who knows her strengths and the most obvious one isn’t an ability to fight serious crime.

Because she’s sleeping in the police station – and occasionally, indeed, with members of the police – she even brings this state of undress into the office.

Those silky blouses from series one have now given way to loosely worn dressing gowns and revealing night-attire – all of which have as much to do with catching a mass murderer as Irish Water has to do with common sense.

Then again when the murderer is played by the man who will shortly hit the big screens as the sadist from Fifty Shades of Grey, you have to fight hard to hold your corner.

Jamie Dornan was obviously committed to series two of this BBC/RTÉ co-production before he landed the part of Christian Grey, but – as Paul Spector – he walks the streets of Belfast in search of female brunettes to murder with a giant pair of scissors.

This smouldering serial killer is no stranger to removal of clothing either in the cause of television ratings and between the pair of them, all that’s missing is a no-holds-barred encounter on the hard floor of a prison cell.

Of course, to manage that, Stella would have to catch Paul and while she’s closing in at a rate of knots now, you’d have to say that a series and a bit of buffeting around in the dark does nothing for the PSNI’s reputation for fighting serious crime.

Perhaps the blame for that should also lie at the feet of Assistant Chief Constable Jim Burns, because he spends most of his time gazing forlornly at his temporary recruit from the Met, a woman he had an affair with two years earlier.

So he goes all doe-eyed every time she walks into the room, rendering him completely incapable of making a rational decision that doesn’t involve a return visit to Stella’s hotel room.

The Fall is good, but it’s not good enough to sustain a second series of the same old thing – Spector working as a bereavement counsellor by day and killing at will by night, in a city that the world and its mother knows has a police force capable of dealing with much worse than a one-man murder machine.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.