Down Cemetery Road

This was a deeply frustrating show. We have an Oxford academic partnered in apparent domestic how many with her banker partner when a supposed gas explosion shatters the ambience of a dinner party. Our academic, for reasons that are unclear, takes it upon herself to investigate the cause of the explosion and track down a young young girl who survived the explosion and subsequently went missing.

There are several mysterious characters following the academic, and each other and a private investigator, Zoe Boehm, and her husband becoming involved as well. We also find out that the ministry defence seem to be behind the cover-up and the attempts of a bumbling desk officer to clean things up only succeed in making it worse.

We have some high calibre actors but sadly much of that talent goes to waste on a frustrating and messy story. Many of the motivations are unclear and almost everyone seems to act in their own worst interest and every episode seems just a bit too long and although it looked like everything was coming to a climax at the end of episode six, much as we longed for this it turns out that there are another two entire episodes to go.

Had it actually ended after six shows I might have been more kind but this is just too long, too messy, and way too silly. I did try to read the book on which this was based but gave up for very similar reasons. Where it not for the success of “Slow Horses”, which is by the same author, than this, the earlier book would never have seen the television lights at all. The book was very clearly a first draft or something that would like to become slow horses, all of the tropes are there – the dry humour, the machinations of large organisations and exciting action sequences but there is still a great deal of flab in this story that are yet to be refined.

So at this point, I haven’t seen the final two episodes but hate them already!

An early, and much lesser work by this author that should never have been made.