Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Tamzin Outhwaite, Dennis Waterman, Denis Lawson, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Ann Firbank, Emily Taffe, Louis Mahoney, Julie Graham, Georgine Anderson, Samuel Taylor, Jasper Jacob, Keith Ramsey, Katherine Jakeways, Emma Ballantine, Ruby Thompson, Arthur Shuttleworth, Scott Stevenson, Emma Louise Williams.
Ghosts are everywhere. Not the spectral kind in which some of the most awful horror films make their killing but in the everyday, the scent of woman’s perfume as she glides serenely past can remind you of a much loved Grandmother’s fragrance, a long forgotten song on the radio, played with unsuspecting charm, can lead you to remember a lost friend with whom you were inseparable from or a familiar house in which you haven’t lived in for 30 years can still have the mind imagine all the games you played as child in your bedroom and all the lost fumbled kisses in which you wish you had the courage to ask for.
The memory of ghosts is what drives us on to create more memories. For one woman in the latest episode of New Tricks memory was becoming a stranger but she was still haunted by it.
Ghosts arguably stands out as one of the most upsetting episodes of New Tricks that the team behind the successful series has ever placed before the public. The sadness that even 60 years after the events that took place which led to the death of P.C. Jimmy Hargreaves was so palpable it could have been breathing the same air as the viewer, it could have asked, as the team rightly surmised, that in a street full of men, dockers perhaps seeing how close Whitechapel is to the Thames, that not one man took on the abusive and violent man. The scene in which the miscarried baby’s remains are found was one in which many viewers could have sympathised with. It was powerful and an attentive piece of broadcasting.
Ghosts though stood out for bringing more of the background story of Steve McAndrew, played by Denis Lawson, to the forefront for the viewers. The delicate mirroring shown between Steve McAndrew’s personal life with his ex-wife Tricia McAndrew, played by Julie Graham, and the violence that lives just out of sight in his life was an echo through the decades to that which Nancy Evans endured. This subtle framing of a policeman’s life across six decades was expertly captured and the differences between the two explained well.
It takes a lot for New Tricks to catch the viewer unawares, to show them something behind the veiled curtain of late evening respectability in which the programme enjoys its limelight. However Ghosts have a habit of coming out at the least expected of times, for Nancy Evans and Steve McAndrew, they happen when something pulls the trigger of memory and reminiscence.
New Tricks continues next Monday.
Ian D. Hall