’Bodies’

An engrossing if occasionally confusing murder mystery as one body is found by four detectives in the exact same location (Longharvest Lane, London) across four different timelines: 1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053.

Across its eight episodes, that one naked male body unravels a conspiracy that spans centuries as the four, independently, try to identify who and what happened.

Bodies approaches its tale non-chronologically, interweaving the investigation by Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas), detective in a totalitarian 2053 England, with that of 19th century Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller). Corrupt war time detective Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) inadvertently leaves clues for Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) in present day London. But its not only the identity of the body that connects the four narratives – wealthy Victorian benefactor Julian Harker (Stephen Graham) is the spitting image of the totalitarian Elias Mannix who has instructed Maplewood to answer to him, and him only, in her investigations. One thing is soon apparent – they’re all connected to a catastrophe that shaped the world around 2023. Working backward in time, each interaction and clue helps build out the reasoning for the audience – time constraints make this obviously more difficult for the four detectives!

It’s the personal dramas of the four that flesh out the eight part series and create a deep empathy with the narratives unfolding on the screen. Each is, in some way, an outsider – the admired Hasan is a hijab-wearing, single-parent Muslim woman whilst the generally disliked Whiteman is Jewish. The married Hillinghead struggles with his sexuality, attracted as is he is to the photographer (George Parker) who discovered the body; a disabled Maplewood owes her mobility to the technological advances made by the establishment. Each struggles within their department as assumptions, bureaucracies and personal animosities impose on investigations yet each is determined, for their own reasons, to fight through.

It’s a superbly well-crafted miniseries as time needs to be either adhered to or interfered with, dependent upon which side of the narrative as it explores people, place and time. And eventually – and skilfully – Bodies becomes a race against time. Just why is Hasan’s name to be found on a document in a vault sealed 130 years earlier?

Rating: 71%

‘Happy Valley’ (Seasons 1-3)

Set in the industrial Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, Happy Valley is a riveting 18-part, three season drama centring on the personal and professional life of Police Sergeant Catherine Cawood and her immediate family.

Exploring the ties that bind, Cawood (a superb, empathic Sarah Lancashire) is a popular sergeant working out of the small police station in Sowerby Bridge, a few miles west of the larger Halifax. She lives at home with grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah) and sister, recovering addict Clare (Siobhan Finneran). It’s the historical background behind this arrangement that forms the central drama to all three seasons (shot over a nine year period) of Happy Valley. Family is the heart of the series: police investigations, whilst core to the unfolding narratives, are, with one significant exception, almost secondary.

Tragedy struck the Cawoods a decade earlier with the suicide of teenage Becky, Ryan’s mother, just weeks after the boy’s birth. With Catherine overcome with grief, refusing to give up Ryan, the Cawood family fractured – husband Richard (Derek Riddell) moved out, as did their 19 year-old son, Daniel (Karl Davies). Hanging in the air is the fact Ryan is the result of rape: recently released prisoner Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) is the biological father but unaware of the boy. It’s the conflict between Catherine and Royce, whom she blames for Becky’s death, that creates the intensity of the unfolding drama over the three seasons. She fights tooth and nail to ensure there is no contact between him and her grandson: it’s how Catherine deals with its escalation and her uncompromising stance that impacts on the rest of the family.

Interwoven in the family dramas is the everyday procedural work of the local police force. Royce is integral to enquiries and suspicions of the main season one investigation (and which spills over into seasons two and three). Over the course of the 18 epsiodes, Happy Valley features kidnapping, rape, multiple murders, extortion, prostitution, drugs, violence, police corruption as well as the minor daily infringements. Yet this is a very British prolice procedural narrative: this is no gun-toting underbelly of Los Angeles or Chicago. Ne’er a gun is fired and, in most instances, rules are followed. Catherine can be a bit of a larrikin but audience empathy is completely behind everything she does.

Admittedly, the central drama between Catherine and Royce pushes the boundaries of believability and slips into melodrama – but central characters Sarah and the desperate-to-please Clare are so preoccupied with their everyday, it almost doesn’t matter. The three seasons are building to that final confrontation, come what may – and the audience is taken every step of the way.

Rating: 82%

‘Mary Shelley’

The extraordinary love affair between Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Byshe Shelley and the resulting penning of Frankenstein is manna from heaven for storytelling.

But the clunky treatment by director Haifaa Al-Mansour and a cast guilty of overacting (Bel Powley as Mary’s stepsister, Gail, in particular) undermines the story and the quiet performances of Elle Fanning and Stephen Dillane as her father who disapproves of her love affair with the 21 year-old married Shelley.

Engaging as a story but sadly, as a film, a misfire.

Rating: 47%

Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda, Women Without Shadows)

Writer: Emma Jensen

Main cast: Elle Fanning (The Beguiled, Maleficent), Stephen Dillane (Darkest Hour, Welcome to Sarajevo), Bel Powley (A Royal Night Out, Diary of a Teenage Girl)