The Control Room (BBC1)
Rating:
This is a public service message to all extras and stunt performers in crime dramas: will you please just look where you're going?

Drive more carefully!
Practically every thriller on the telly now features a car hurtling into shot like a four-wheeled plot twist and smashing into a central character. It's so common that, whenever an actor crosses the road or pulls out of a junction, I'm expecting them to be T-boned.
This happened on both main channels, without warning but quite predictably, as two new serials launched.





A suspect is killed by a high-speed red herring in Murder In Provence





CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Come on Nasa...
In both series a car smashes into a central character, but only one survives

But that was his only bit of luck, though the succession of disasters — seeing him threatened with a beating, quizzed by police and then blackmailed by a colleague — was mostly his own fault.
It's a bit of a worry because Gabriel (Iain De Caestecker) is an emergency call handler, whose job is to prevent people from panicking when they dial 999.
He loses his head entirely after recognising the voice of one woman. She's his childhood sweetheart, Sam (Joanna Vanderham), and she's ringing to say she's just battered her abusive partner over the head with a dumbbell.
‘Is the patient breathing?' asked Gabriel.
‘Yeah, he's bleeding everywhere,' she says, confused by his accent.
You can't blame her, because Glasgow-born De Caestecker is doing a brogue so raw, he makes Sir Alex Ferguson sound like Bertie Wooster.







The three-part serial is thick with nightmarish atmosphere that makes Gabriel's blind terror believable as he stumbles from crisis to crisis

The investigating judge Antoine and his endlessly patient partner Marine (Roger Allam and Лучшие фильмы онлайн Nancy Carroll) hold hands at every moment on Murder In Provence, unless they're cuddling in bed or leaning on each other's shoulders by the sea.

All French detectives must have a devoted spouse, a law laid down by Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret. Antoine and Marine are saved from terminal tweeness by Allam's sardonic relish in his constant quips. He speaks every line as if he can taste the blood in it.
Abandoning his plans for a saucy stay in a hotel, he heard the details of an academic's murder with spiteful pleasure.

‘And I thought my weekend had turned out badly,' he said. With a classic Citroen and jeans two sizes too tight, Judge Antoine is a richly drawn figure: fussy, vain, courageous and maudlin.
The other characters have less depth so far, but this was a promising beginning.