‘The Field of Blood’: Episode 2 review

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‘I want to be a journalist, not a Bunny Girl,’ Daily News copygirl Paddy Meehan (Jayd Johnson) explains to the police investigating the death of her colleague Heather Allen – and if the opening instalment of this likeable adaptation of Denise Mina’s novel overdid the ‘80s retro and the Raintown-esque Glaswegian backdrops, the concluding part matches the visuals and the wistful nostalgia with dark good humour, sex and violence, and a kind of seedy, side-street splendour as Paddy does her best to prove her youthful cousin innocent of murder and become a fully-fledged reporter into the process.

Paddy teams up with Northerner-about-the-newsroom Terry Hewitt (Robin Hood’s Jonas Armstrong) who coos, ‘I like this – we’re Woodward and Bernstein.’ Unfortunately, it only takes one scary run-in with iffy grocer Henry Naismith (Gavin Mitchell) before the partnership has become more Clark Kent and Lois Lane and they’re having spectacularly underwhelming sex.

Things rapidly worsen when Paddy realises that Naismith isn’t the killer – it’s his psychotic son Darren (William Ruane), with whom she was flirting in Episode 1 – and she gets a punch in the face and a dial telephone upsides her head, all in the name of getting her press card. Jayd Johnson takes every demanding scene in her stride, portraying vulnerability, determination and even (during a particularly gruelling scene in which ten year old Callum Ogilvy, played by Robert Dickson, recounts the dreadful events leading up to the murder of toddler Brian Wilcox) a very adult kind of compassion with confidence and panache.

But despite Johnston’s breakthrough distinction, Armstrong’s bemused charm and David Morrissey’s ongoing ability to appear as perfectly at home in early 1980s Glasgow as the Rubix Cube, it’s Peter Capaldi who steals the show. Dispensing with Malcolm Tucker’s mobile phone and profane invective (ironically, he’s the one character in The Field of Blood who doesn’t swear like a disgruntled docker), he gives a superb performance as Dr. Pete, the whisky-riven, lapsed Catholic journo dying of liver cancer who finds defiance and dignity even amid the debasement of his own demise.

‘How come everybody’s a cynic around here?’ Paddy asks. ‘Cynics are just heartbroken idealists,’ Pete replies before taking the rap for her when she ill-advisedly plants evidence on Naismith senior and – in the episode’s finest moment – raggedly and ferociously spitting the aching, febrile beauty of Dylan Thomas’s ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ across the Press Bar.

If that doesn’t bring tears to the eyes, the penultimate scene (again in the smoky, sticky-tabled ambience of a Govan howff) will – unless you are Malcolm Tucker, of course, in which case you’ll probably prefer the sage counsel of dyed-in-the-malt hack McVie (Ford Kiernan), who advises Paddy: ‘Never buy on hire/purchase, don’t ever bet on a horse called “Lucky” and never go to Blackpool. It’s fucking horrible.’

The final sequence – in which Paddy, now a fully-fledged journalist, goes home and elects to head up to her bedroom alone rather than join her chatting, laughing family in the kitchen – is a suitably muted, melancholy conclusion to a drama that has, amid its occasionally histrionic bloodiness and bottomless well of blue language, provided some moments of bleakly understated beauty.

Aired at 10.35pm on Monday 5th September 2011 on BBC One.

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