Dalgliesh

If you’re going to watch Dalgliesh—and really, I hope you do—put down your phone. Put down your phone, turn your subtitles on, and let yourself fall under the spell of television that trusts you to actually watch.

For all their intrinsic power, these images of sudden horror are mere details compared with the storytelling that brings this series to roaring life (the script was written by Helen Edmundson).

It’s all almost provocatively basic, but I always enjoy Dalgliesh. It’s all down to Carvel, who keeps his performance as the widowed detective meticulously subtle, dignified and steeped in underlying melancholy.

Death in Holy Orders isn’t the most thrilling of PD James’s plots (I haven’t read the book but I have seen both episodes and had guessed the killer by the end of episode one) but it was helped enormously by two guest performances.

You get the impression Dalgliesh has its eyes on a higher prize than simply being a variant on Midsomer Murders. Yet it drip-feeds its principal characterisation so sparingly that I’m no nearer to knowing what makes Dalgliesh tick now than when it started three years ago.

We continue to enjoy Dalgliesh because of Bertie Carvel’s grimace-filled empathetic portrayal of Adam Dalgliesh. We just wish we had more info about the detective and somewhat more tightly-written mysteries.

If you like straightforward British procedurals based on classic characters, than Dalgliesh won’t disappoint. But there seems to be a lost opportunity to dive more into Dalgliesh’s interesting character, especially given who is playing the detective this time around.