Written and directed by David Kane from the novel by Denise Mina, The Field of Blood is a thriller so smothered in nicotinic, 1980s nostalgia it could almost be called ‘Fag-ashes to Fag-ashes’.
The superb Jayd Johnson plays Paddy Meehan, a teenage copygirl at the Glasgow Daily News, an insular world riven with smoke, swearing and sexism, where corruption and back-stabbing are as common as early morning whisky-swilling and cynical, self-centred opportunism.
Even the paper’s editor, Murray Devlin (played by the ever-impressive David Morrissey, who is becoming as much a staple of gritty urban period dramas as Ford Granada Mark IIs in police colours) is contemptuous of the hacks in his employ, describing them as ‘a mean-spirited bunch of bastards, every last one of them… hearts like bones, minds trained to think the worst of everyone’.
Undeterred by the misogyny of the mostly male newsroom (‘You’re just a fat tart who makes the coffee,’ she is bluntly informed at one point), Paddy dreams of making the leap from dogsbody to journalist and gets the opportunity she needs when her ten year old cousin is arrested for the murder of a toddler. However, fearing a backlash from her family, she decides against using her inside knowledge to further her career – only for her friend and confidante Heather Allen (Alana Hood), the only female journalist on the paper, to use the information Paddy has passed on in a story of her own.
Infuriated by the betrayal and ostracised by her loved ones, Paddy decides to investigate the murder herself, exposing herself to serious danger far beyond the bucket of urine that Allen receives over the head from the mother of the murdered child. ‘It’s piss!’ she moans, ‘I’m covered in piss!’
Wonderfully foul-mouthed throughout, the portrayal of Glasgow’s high-rise estates, dingy, men-only pubs and two-kids-to-a-bed, working class, Catholic homes is more This Is Scotland ’82 than any wistfully rose-tinted portrayal of the past. Yet there are several moments of dark good humour amid the bleakness (‘Brave boy, wearing an earring,’ Paddy remarks to a lad she encounters, ‘I heard a guy got beaten up around here for using an umbrella’) and the pulsating, upbeat alternative ‘80s soundtrack – The Jam, XTC, Gang of Four, Wah! and Talking Heads – balances out the gloominess of the setting and the storyline.
The bloody climax of this opening instalment leaps out like the bogeyman in a dark alley several minutes before it actually occurs, but in a drama as engrossing and enjoyable as this, such obviousness is as forgivable as the occasional lapse in the spiky dialogue.
Yes, Heather Allen does at one point spit out the well-worn cliché, ‘You’re finished!’ after having her head shoved down the toilet by an enraged Paddy – but even though this is the character’s second urinal encounter of the episode, The Field of Blood can never be accused of taking the piss.
Airs at 10.15pm on Monday 29th August 2011 on BBC One.