This week's TV: Dalziel not dazzling

William Gallagher looks at the week's TV

By the BBC's William Gallagher

The best detective show of recent years returns to BBC One this week but do not worry too much if you miss it.

For the once unmissable Dalziel and Pascoe (29 October 2030 BST, BBC One) has gone into a slump lately that this first of the new run does not entirely escape.

It is still a decent show and far less formulaic than Inspector Morse quickly became, but there has been something lacking since it ran out of Dalziel and Pascoe novels to adapt.

There used to be a sense with this show that each episode had just too much story - that it was only just boiled down into feature-length and was continually straining to tell more.

It was great - you needed to concentrate and you were rewarded if you did.

Critics hated Hale and Pace's Dalziel and Pascoe and nobody disagreed with them

Yet we so nearly did not get this series at all. For some reason the novels lay ignored by film and television for years - and then when they were noticed, it was murder.

Comedians Hale and Pace apparently loved the novels and managed, with Yorkshire Television, to get the rights to make a television series.

Comedians bring a certain audience with them to new ventures but they also block certain audiences.

So people who did not like Hale and Pace ignored the show and people who did arguably did not enjoy them playing serious roles.

Critics hated Hale and Pace's Dalziel and Pascoe and nobody disagreed with them, at least nobody whose name wasn't on the show's end credits.

Warren Clarke was well cast as Dalziel

That should have been it - nobody else should have touched the books for a long time until the memory of this version died away. But BBC bid for the rights.

Slimmer

Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan were well-cast, even if Clarke's Dalziel is vastly slimmer and more polite in the series and, with no offence meant to Hale and Pace, the two were actors where the comedians were not.

Based on the early novels, those first few BBC Dalziel and Pascoe stories were better than the books they adapted.

But the strength of the books is that they grow exceptionally to a point where they are not crime stories, they are true novels that happen to involve characters who are police officers.

The show did not keep pace but it rarely failed entirely.

Bones and Silence, a tremendous and at times hilarious book in the set, for instance, did become a little limp on screen.

Slumped

And The Wood Beyond, by far the best book, became a strong episode of the series - and unfortunately the last one.

There have been several since but they have all been original stories rather than dramatisations and without exception they have slumped below the previous standard.

Perhaps this is what is now wrong with the show - not that it is weaker than the ones based on books but that Dalziel and Pascoe have lost their way.

And perhaps the next three new stories in this run will radically improve.

But this one is not helped by a scene shot in silhouette for no purpose at all and an interrogation where, from the front, Dalziel's cigarette pumps out 40 times more smoke than is possible, but is barely noticeable from behind.