After the Flood, review: promising crime drama gets bogged down by its damp plot
How refreshing, I thought to myself, as After the Flood (ITV1) began. A police drama that isn’t about a murder! We’re in a Northern town where the river has burst its banks, and officers are scrambling to deal with the emergency.
There is danger – a baby swept away after his mother’s car becomes trapped in rising floodwaters – and the logistical issues of evacuating residents, whose concerns include looters and how a tank of tropical fish will survive after a power cut. Then, inevitably, there’s a murder. Rare is the TV drama that can manage without one. Still, the flood adds interest and makes for an arresting opening sequence. A man leaps into the water to save the aforementioned baby, succeeds in rescuing it but is carried away himself.
This is all observed by PC Joanna Marshall (Sophie Rundle), who seems strangely inert until we learn that she’s seven months pregnant. Marshall has an understanding boss but an unlikeable husband who also works on the force and exhibits the kind of mildly controlling/belittling behaviour that would give Mumsnet messageboard-users a field day.
On her last day on the beat before transferring to desk duties, Marshall is called to a murder scene: a body in a lift. This is something she’s keen to investigate, because she’s training to be a detective. But Unlikeable Husband thinks she should stay in her lane and leave the detecting to people like him. To be fair, he has a point because Marshall decides that the best way to trace the dead man’s relatives is to go outside police channels and to seek a DNA match via a genealogy website, despite a colleague explaining that this would be illegal. Shall we put this idiotic move down to pregnancy hormones?
Writer Mick Ford has set up a decent mystery here and fleshed out the drama by supplying Marshall with a busy personal life – besides the husband and the pregnancy, she has to contend with her boorish in-laws. But, having watched the whole boxset, I can tell you it sags in the middle thanks to an annoying Frenchwoman and a subplot about a housing development. Philip Glenister is in it, but not enough.
They’ve tried to make it Happy Valley-lite. The location (actually filmed in Derbyshire, but could easily pass for Calderdale), the small community, even the theme music are similar. But we’re not in the same league. Sarah Lancashire would wipe the floor with this lot.
