Winter review: Richard Armitage's cliche-stuffed new police drama leads us into a Winter of discontent
Here he comes, the latest maverick cop/pathologist/crossword setter to hit our screens, all classic car, troubled past and immaculate mid-century sideboard. Winter (ITV, Weds, 9pm) is Ethan Winter, rock-climbing pathologist, owner of a chrome-bumpered MGB GT and talker to dead people.
Yes, Winter, played with saturnine menace by Richard Armitage, is the latest in a long line of dysfunctional crime-fighters, most of whom would be hamstrung by the mere mention of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in the real world.
This being TV Detective Land, however, Winter has no problem following DI Lauren Bell (Annabel Scholey) into crime scenes, watching police interviews through one-way mirrors and fabricating evidence to force a confession.
At one point he stomps off to collect his climbing gear, all the better to abseil down into what Bell says is a well, but is clearly a cave, to examine a body.
“Don't worry, I won't touch anything,” he tells Bell, breezily, his evidential insouciance giving any watching CPS lawyer an attack of the vapours.
This after he has shown his extraordinary sensory capabilities in the middle of a forest as he, Bell and assorted plods search for some missing girls.
Among the trees he stops, lifts his nose and sniffs the air, black hair shining in the late afternoon sun, like a glossy-coated labrador. If labradors wore Barbours and expensive-looking leather boots.
“Compost, rotting meat, faeces,” he mutters to himself. “Inspector, there's a dead body round here.”
This kind of thing comes naturally to Winter. When he's not sniffing out corpses, he's talking to them in the Bristol mortuary. But while, to most people, this might be a sign that he should take a career break, Winter's mortuary slab-side manner is seen as a positive boon to the local force.
“He can read a body like other people can read a book,” Bell's cliched lumbering sidekick tells her. “But I can't say anything about his private life... but he can be very charming.”
I'm not sure about that, to be honest. Winter has a lovely voice, but he's given to whispering things about “mending souls” while peering out from beneath jet-black eyebrows and a furrowed brow, as if he's either thinking really hard or he desperately needs the toilet.
And by the end of the first episode the last piece of the maverick TV detective slips smoothly into place, revealing the source of Winter's troubled past and tortured expressions.
A piece which will form the story arc for the whole series, involving murdered fiancées and mysterious symbols carved into fingers.
Winter shares its cliches with many other shows, and throws in load more from murkily-shot serial killer dramas with one word titles, like Hannibal, Dexter or Mindhunter.
Even the mortuary is straight out of horror-thriller land, and so out there it verges on self-parody.
It's in a disused swimming pool. Yes, Bristol City Council decided a good use for disused swimming pool was the local mortuary – cavernous, the exterior clad in ivy, in the middle of a deep dark wood.
The only reason I can think of for this odd change of use is that some enterprising Police and Crime Commissioner decided it already had the wipe-clean tiles.
Winter is ridiculous on so many levels, scarcely tethered to reality, with even the will-they-won't-they relationship between Winter and Bell reduced to a when-will-they, with clear clues to Bell's husband being a philandering scoundrel and Winter already making her some overnight oats.
And yet it's surprisingly watchable. Armitage seems to be having a lovely old time playing the tortured pathologist and Scholey is good as the world-weary copper.
It's hard to tell, however, if it can manage to transcend the cliches and dial up the weirdness – it would be worth watching the next couple of episodes to find out.