Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Lee Ingleby, Daniel Ryan, Adrian Rawlins, Hermione Norris, Angel Coulby, Fionn O’Shea, Nigel Lindsay, Eloise Webb, Samuel Edward-Cook, Zahra Ahmadi, Hannah Britland, Christine Cole, Tony Gardner, Nicholas Asbury, Elliott Cowan.
To serve time, in any capacity, for a crime you didn’t commit; has to be arguably the most soul destroying, most seething with rage and contempt for your peers that you will ever feel, the emotions run high, the anger always at boiling point, and with no way to let off steam because you are locked away. The system, corrupt and dishonest, shakes your belief to the very core and no matter how hard it is to keep face, to show the world you are not beaten, the illusion of being Innocent soon slips away; society exacting its pound of flesh in revenge for the misdeeds you didn’t commit.
Being Innocent and having other people believe you are not guilty of the crime is all consuming, it is what drives us to find the evidence to prove our word, what makes such great films such as The Shawshank Redemption so positive and enthralling; yet real life does not come with a happy ending and the chances are that someone somewhere framed you because they hated you and wanted to make you suffer for a once perceived slight, that the system, keen to make an example of you, will follow suit and keep you down and those that were your friends, never speak to you again.
It is fraud against the soul, an exacting crime against the individual, and one that is neatly portrayed in Matthew Arlidge and Chris Lang’s Innocent.
This four-part series sees Lee Ingleby step out of the shoes of Detective Bacchus, a character he played with great distinction alongside Martin Shaw in Inspector George Gently, and inhabit the other side of the thin blue line as a man who has seven years of his life taken from him as all around him found it easy to condemn him, the weight of judgement based upon on conceived ideas and deceitful police investigations.
Innocent, we can but all hope the truth one day comes out and for all the accusations labelled at our door, that those that lie for their own sake for gain, to shed and shift the blame elsewhere, will get their day in the sun to explain themselves; but in some eyes you will never be innocent, and it is that searing confrontation between prejudiced policeman and member of the public which sets the whole tone for the series.
Lee Ingleby is enthralling as the beaten down but not out David Collins, and alongside Daniel Ryan as his brother Phil, Hermione Norris as his sister-in-law, Nigel Lindsay as D.I. Beech and Christine Cole as Louise Wilson, Innocent’s cast and setting is more than enough to capture the fear in the words of being pronounced guilty by all around you, that the sentence handed down is unfair, unjust and untrue; that the world cannot wait to bring us all to book and label us accountable.
A very good four-part story, one on which the twists does keep the armchair detective on their toes.
Ian D. Hall