If you’ve had elderly relatives conned, Silent Witness will make your blood boil ...Middle East

Series number 28 and will anything trigger the demise of the ancient but still roadworthy Silent Witness? Nuclear war perhaps, or robots taking over the work of the forensics bods at the Lyell Centre? Either way, BBC One’s long-running (since 1996) crime drama continues to show almost Doctor Who levels of regeneration.

There certainly seems to have been a wholesale cast clear-out since the last series, with no sign of Velvy (Alastair Michael), Gabriel (Aki Omoshaybi) or Cara (Rhiannon May). In fact, newly engaged lovebirds Dr Nikki Alexander and Jack Hodgson (Emilia Fox and David Caves) had the place to themselves as the new series began, taking advantage of their solitude for a spot of canoodling.

They were rudely interrupted by the arrival of workmen lugging (of all things) a grand piano – followed by the piano player herself. This was the Lyell Centre’s new head, Harriet Maven (Maggie Steed), who’d been called out of retirement (in Jack’s words) “to save us”. As his aggrieved comment suggests, there was instant friction between Harriet and Jack. Constantly practising her piano scales while Jack and Nikki try to focus on their work didn’t exactly help.

Steed – a distinguished veteran actor most recently seen in Paddington 2 and Fisherman’s Friends – is an asset to any TV show and has already added some welcome pep to the proceedings. Her maverick spikiness will provide some welcome contrast to Jack and Nikki cooing at each other.

The episode title was Exodus 20:17, which those with a Bible to hand (or more likely, Google) would have discovered is about not coveting your neighbour’s house, wife, male servant, ox or donkey. What seemed to be coveted here was a timbered country house recently owned by a murder victim.

We met this elderly woman in a woozy pre-credit sequence. Suffering from vascular dementia and under the illusion that she was picking foxgloves with a youthful sweetheart (in fact, an all too real ne’er-do-well), she was led to a cave and left to die.

There was another vulnerable geriatric, Benjamin Dawson (David Hargreaves), who kept turning up at the aforementioned half-timbered house looking for a previous owner called Gloria. The current occupants, a young couple, understandably became increasingly angry with Benjamin’s deranged visits – especially as one of them was heavily pregnant.

Playing Nice will strike fear into the heart of any parent

Benjamin meanwhile had problems of his own – cowboy builders who wanted to charge him £58,000 to fix his gutters. Anyone who has elderly relatives who have been thus targeted (as indeed I do) will have felt their blood boil. Meanwhile, the police end of the investigation saw the return of DI John Flynn, played by Sean Pertwee. If the face wasn’t familiar, then Pertwee’s low, murmuring voice might have been. He provides the mouth-watering narration on MasterChef; the Professionals.

All in all, this was non-vintage Silent Witness. The end credits included the caption: “In memory of Helen Whitwell”. Whitwell, who died in 2024, was the professor of forensic pathology who was the inspiration for Sam Ryan, Amanda Burton’s character in the first eight series of the show.

Perhaps a backhanded tribute to Whitwell was that the forensics business in this latest episode was more interesting than the characters. The squeamish, however, may have wanted to look away as Nikki applied a scalpel to the victim’s rotted fingertips or prepared to poke around in her grey matter (“Oh good… Dr Alexander is going to open up the skull!” exclaimed gleeful new boss Harriet from the viewing platform). Given the current dominance of cosy crime, the unblinkingly realistic approach of this 28-year-old show could almost be called refreshingly radical.

‘Silent Witness’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One

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