The Northumbria Mysteries brings us a new daytime cozy crime drama, centered around ex-jailbird Joe Ruby (Robson Green – The Game), and as you’d expect from this sort of daytime drama, there’s a ‘dead body of the day’.
This will be a spoiler-free review, and it’s safe to set out the premise of how Joe’s a community helper on a voluntary rehab scheme, but thanks to someone being brown bread, his path will cross with well-to-do DI Rose O’Connell (Liz White – The Long Shadow), her posh prose being in contrast to her broad Mancunian accent as a PC on Life on Mars… okay, that was 20 years ago.
This is as lightweight as you expect. There’s a typical good cop/bad cop routine, where Rose bundles off her underling, and gives all the details to Joe about the state the body was found in, as part of the questioning, because we know she really wants him around to help, and I do wonder whether the old romantic tropes will play out in due course, although there is a bit of an age gap, and Robson is almost 62.
Addtionally, there’s a boo-hiss villain from Corrie, in the form of Chris Gascoyne (Patience Series 2), as Ace Dawson, from the Dawson crime family, so you know that over the eight episodes, things are going to kick off with him before long.
As for who did the deed, naturally, I never guess who the baddie is in these sorts of programmes, and I obviously won’t spoil it, here.
As an aside, there’s an odd, slight vertical stretching of the image, so everyone looks like their heads are more oval than they should be. Not sure why they’ve done that, but at least there’s one mystery that won’t be solved!
The Northumbria Mysteries begins today on BBC1 at 2pm, and runs weekly.
It’s not yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD, but when it is, it will be listed on the New DVD, Blu-ray, 3D and 4K releases UK page.
All episodes are now on the BBC iPlayer.
Series Directors: Duncan Foster, Gordon Anderson
Writers: Gordon Anderson, Aschlin Ditta, Kitty Percy, Vivienne Harvey, Keith Temple
Cast:
Joe Ruby: Robson Green
DI Rose O’Connell: Liz White
DS Raj Singh: Gurjeet Singh
Father David Rutherford: Simon Callow
‘Ace’ Dawson: Chris Gascoyne
Brother Christopher Akintola: Damola Adelaja
Benedict Bancroft: Alexander Arnold
Sister Marie Wilson: Laurie Ogden
Brother Mark Bancroft: Alex Croft
Madam Crystal: Rachel Marwood
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.