Virdee bucks the cosy crime trend – in the bleakest possible way ...Middle East

There’s an old crime fiction cliché that a story’s setting is as much a character as any of its heroes and villains. That platitude is celebrated with gusto in Virdee, a stylish yet joyless adaptation of AA Dhand’s bestselling thriller series about a tough guy cop fighting the good fight in noir(ish) Bradford.

Judging by a spectacularly gloomy first of six episodes, Bradford is a cross between Al Capone’s Chicago, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Michael Mann’s Heat. Moody drone shots portray the city centre as a warren of shadows and skullduggery; everyone talks like protagonists from a gumshoe novel.

“You can’t do that – this is England!” gasps a minor villain at one point, as sulky hero Harry Virdee (Staz Nair, whose first screen appearance was a 2012 X Factor audition) subjects him to a brutal, off-the-books interrogation. “This is Bradford!” shoots back Virdee. Any similarity to the “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” line from the Roman Polanski noir classic is presumably intentional.

Any self-respecting noir will feature a tragic love story, and there is an element of that in Virdee. The lead detective is from a Sikh background, while his wife, Saima (Aysha Kala), is of Indian-Muslim heritage. Virdee’s father (Good Gracious Me’s Kulvinder Ghir) and others in his community cannot forgive him for crossing what they regard as a religious red line. That fact is made painfully clear when Saima is on the receiving end of a racial slur in an early scene set at a wedding (which goes on almost as long as the eternal nuptials at the beginning of The Godfather).

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It’s all a bit grim, and the bleak mood is reflected in the decision to have most of the action take place in the wee hours. At least Virdee bucks the recent trend of BBC shows unfolding at night being impossible to follow, so inky is the darkness.

But there are other problems. A sequence in which Virdee chases a suspect down a train line has so much nauseating shaky-cam action that sensitive viewers may need a lie-down and a cold, damp cloth across the forehead.

All good detective dramas live or die by their lead character, and huffing Virdee is a tad too stoic for his own good. He’s forever stomping around looking sad, and when he’s with Saima, he spends all his time gazing into her eyes and blubbing on about how much she means to him. It’s good that he cares, but they never convince as an actual couple who might do real couple things, such as falling asleep in front of Netflix or popping out to Nando’s.

The series also suffers from pacing issues. Part one focuses on the search for a missing teenager and Virdee’s relationship with his brother-in-law, who just happens to be one of the biggest criminals in West Yorkshire – a fact our heroic copper has managed to keep secret. But then, at literally the last minute, it is revealed that there is a serial killer on the loose in Bradford.

Just as Virdee shapeshifts into something more interesting, the credits roll. Why string us along for an entire 60 minutes?

The thriller genre has been overwhelmed lately with cosy crime dramas, where the heroes are inevitably white and middle-class men, wisecracking while investigating horrific murders. Virdee is a welcome pushback against that trend – not just because its lead character is of South Asian heritage but also because it isn’t afraid to be grown up and serious.

There’s nothing funny about violence and death – and goodness, is Virdee ever aware of that. Yet for all its admirable qualities (and despite Nair’s committed performance), it forgets the most important lesson of all: that a thriller, no matter how grisly, should be fun, not glum.

‘Virdee’ continues next Monday at 9pm on BBC One

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