Strike: The Ink Black Heart (BBC One) | iPlayer
Asia (BBC One)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Netflix)
Dalgliesh (Channel 5) | My5
I’m now convinced that Cormoran Strike, the hero of JK Rowling’s pseudonymous Robert Galbraith crime fiction, was always conceived as a tragic black-and-white movie character, with added 21st-century sarcasm and dishevelment.
As played by Tom Burke in the BBC TV series Strike – now, with the four-part adaptation of Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart, on its sixth outing – there is a dash of Uber Eats-era Orson Welles to the brooding amputee war hero turned private detective. Holliday Grainger’s Robin is positioned as another stock silver screen character: the outspoken Girl Friday foil who shouldn’t be underestimated.
Are they finally going to get together, perchance as an early Christmas gift to viewers? Not if these opening scenes are anything to go by. Picking up from where they left off in 2022’s Troubled Blood, a post-dinner smooch seems imminent (“For chrissakes, get on with it!”, yells the Great British Public), but Robin draws back. Which makes perfect sense if they’re intended as the Hinge generation’s Bogie and Bacall, steaming up the screen with delayed gratification.
In Troubled Blood, Strike was so morose and draggy, he got on my nerves, but now he has recovered his brio. Indeed, the thwarted frisson between the self-denying leads turns out to be the strongest element of this series’ overcooked plot (pity adapter, Tom Edge: the book is more than a thousand pages long). After the young female creator of a cult online animation is killed, a convoluted mystery involves everything from digital murk, trolls and a sinister character called Anomie, to culture wars, incels and generalised misogyny.
I’m not convinced viewers want all this jammed into a crime drama – certainly not at the expense of atmosphere, revelation and lashings of psychology. Just as it’s difficult to resist drawing parallels with Rowling’s real-world social media battles, it’s also hard to take the story seriously when animated online elements featuring a cloaked Anomie suggest V for Vendetta meets Scooby-Doo.
What saves The Ink Black Heart from structural collapse is that, despite the aborted smooch, the chemistry between Strike and Robin powers along beautifully. Whatever else is going on, the star-crossed sleuths remain eminently watchable.
I’m sure, like many a spoilt Brit, I tend to take for granted all that David Attenborough natural world documentaries bring, but what a jaw-dropping series Asia (BBC One) has been. High in the mountains, deep in aquamarine oceans, burrowing into lush forests, scorching on hot sand… is there no part of the largest continent that Attenborough’s intrepid camera crews haven’t poked into, zoomed over and scrutinised these past weeks?
The seventh and final episode looks at the conservationists who are trying to do something to protect species from predators, poachers, extinction – or, too often, it seems, from everything and everyone all at once.
We watched a sun bear released back into the wilds of Borneo: a complicated business involving sedation, crates, helicopters and risky landings on patches of volcanic mud. James Bond, eat your heart out. All that was missing was a shaken, not stirred Martini.
In Java there were intensive breeding programmes for green magpies. Elsewhere, reforestation projects, and facial recognition technology employed to protect certain species of fish. In scenes that almost registered as science fiction, orphaned shark embryos were nurtured in dark, warm laboratory conditions that served as artificial shark uteruses.
The conservation facts are grisly and dispiriting: wildlife is a huge global black market commodity, worth more than $20bn. On the other hand there are people, as shown in this series, making a difference. Isn’t that the hidden superpower of Attenborough docuseries? They’re all about nature – all those creatures, all that fauna and foliage, in need of protection – but they’re also about human nature, the best of us.
Time to check out the first half-series, eight-episode drop of the Netflix Spanish-language adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 literary showcase of Latin American magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
With José Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries) as lead writer, the cast includes Claudio Catano, Marco González and Susana Morales. Set in the fictional Colombian district of Macondo, and spanning seven generations of a family, it becomes a sprawling tale of mysticism, revenge, honour, fear, folklore and highly problematic sexual politics (sexual assault; girls selected as wives; young men taken as lovers; women deployed almost as ciphers to explain the behaviour of men).
The opener alone features a marriage between cousins, fears of babies born with pig tails, cockfights, murder, ghostly visitations and more. There are times when it feels as if Netflix was so scared of being accused of dumbing down that it has gone too far the other way, trying to convey too much, and topping it off with an intrusive, dominating voiceover (drama should be drama, not an audiobook you can watch). There’s much to relish here – lushly fantastical visuals; a sense of spirit and ambition – but it’s not for the faint-hearted.
On Channel 5, Bertie Carvel can be found performing more quietly elegant miracles as the PD James detective Adam Dalgliesh in the latest series of Dalgliesh. The third and final mystery (each story is delivered as a two-parter) is a dramatisation of 1989’s Devices and Desires. A serial killer dubbed the Whistler is on the prowl. Late 1970s Britain, when all anybody had to eat was Instant Whip, looks suitably pale, dismal and suffused with torpor. Everyone looks shifty. Hippy activists, straight from central casting, live in a caravan and rail against society. A nuclear power station is gratuitously involved. Love it.
It’s all almost provocatively basic, but I always enjoy Dalgliesh. It’s all down to Carvel, who keeps his performance as the widowed detective meticulously subtle, dignified and steeped in underlying melancholy. Three series in, I much prefer him to the overrated Morse.
Star ratings (out of five)
Strike: The Ink Black Heart ★★★
Asia ★★★★★
One Hundred Years of Solitude ★★★
Dalgliesh ★★★
What else I’m watching
The Secret Lives of Animals
(Apple TV+)
Absorbing, glossy new global natural history series examining the life cycles of seals, chimps, spiders and more. All narrated in the dulcet tones of Hugh Bonneville.
Skeleton Crew
(Disney+)
Another action-packed Star Wars spin-off, this one focusing on suburban US kids caught up in intergalactic mayhem. Jude Law plays a renegade space captain.
Game of Throws: Inside Darts
(Sky Documentaries/Now)
Bullseye! Don’t miss this compelling docuseries navigating the new golden age of the “arrows”. Featuring beer, skills, thrills, agonies and 17-year-old UK darts wunderkind, Grand Slam and World Series Finals champion Luke Littler.
