So can Mick Herron follow the success of the TV adaptation of Slow Horses with another hit for Apple TV+ based on his debut novel? Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson are the big names in this new darkly funny whodunnit conspiracy thriller, but there are also lots of familiar faces in it.
The drama is set in – Morse Alert! – Oxford. Ruth Wilson, who I always think should be a shoe-in when they make the next instalment of the Caitlin Moran biopic, plays quietly haunted but big-mouthed Sarah Tucker, a painting restorer who is having a delightful dinner party – apart from the dodgy right wing guest played by Tom Goodman-Hill – when there is an almighty explosion outside. It sounds like Armageddon, though it's actually a gas explosion (or perhaps not...) in the house down the road. There are multiple deaths though, leaving a surviving small daughter and a lot of unanswered questions which Wilson wants answered.
And as she's no private detective she goes to one – or two as it turns out, as Oxford Investigations appears to be a couple, Zoë and Joe Boehm, who have very different methods and personalities. He's meticulous and nerdy and played by big-eared Adam Godley, who you might recognise as Elliott Schwartz in Breaking Bad. She's clad in leather with spiky white hair and attitude and is played by Emma Thompson.
Needless to say Thompson acts everyone off the screen when she's around. So what does Thompson makes of Zoe? “She’s rude, straight-talking, and not good at general conversation, uninterested in people’s private lives, highly moral while presenting as somewhat amoral, and fascinatingly resistant to affection,” she told the Radio Times. She's got steel-coloured hair and steel-coloured personality.
And soon the plot is thickening faster than you can say Bisto. Back in some anonymous government building – which happens to resemble Senate House, part of London University – stiff shouldered white middle class blokes played by the likes of Darren Boyd and Pip Torrens suggest that the explosion was part of some dastardly government plot that has been badly organised by lowly Hamza Malik (Adeel Akhtar), who gets so strsssed he promptly puts his hand in a chicken tikka masala takeaway.
Anyway I thought Down Cemetery Road was cliche-riddled rubbish – the script, I notice, is by Morwenna Banks, who does the voice of mummy pig in Peppa Pig. But rivetting cliche-riddled rubbish. Will I be watching the rest of the season? You can bet your chicken tikka masala on it.
Picture: Apple TV+
