Emerging from the dark but running from the light

Last night's TV reviewed: Midnight Man; Women in Black; Inside the Medieval Mind

Time was when every TV crime-solver had some easily identifiable little eccentricity. There was Ironside (stuck in a wheelchair), McCloud (really a cowboy), Kojak (bald, sucked lollipops, kept saying, "Who loves ya, baby?"). But with the rise of maverick cops and team-based crime dramas (Waking the Dead, CSI, NCIS, Law & Order...), the quirks got ironed out. Cracker (overweight, gambling addiction) was a late addition to the genre.

There are signs of a mild resurgence, though, but now, in keeping with the mood of the times, the quirks are psychological, neurotic. So, in recent years, we've had Monk, whose quirk is obsessive-compulsive disorder. And now, in Midnight Man (ITV), we get Max Raban, played by James Nesbitt. Max is an investigative journalist who also has a big problem. As one of his contacts, the only newspaperman who will condescend to talk to him, helpfully asked him, "What about your phobia? Be realistic, Max, disliking daylight is a slight handicap in any career, even journalism." There's quite a bit of this sort of helpfulness around. Raban's estranged wife, for example, tackled him about his condition. "It's called phengophobia (though it sounded like “finger-phobia”), or have you forgotten?" Forgotten? I'm flattered you think I might ever have known.

As quirks go, this one feels strained and seemingly superfluous to plot requirements. Max is a fox, basically, because he comes out at night to go through rubbish bins. Maybe he makes love loudly in other people's gardens at 3am, too - most journalists like to I think. I know I do. To be fair, though, it's quite nicely executed. On the one occasion in the first episode when Max actually did venture out by day, bundled up in shabby hat and rather effeminate shades, the camera caught him paralysed in a shaft of light. This lacked the force of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which vampires, on the odd occasions that they were forced into the sun, would scurry into the shade, smouldering around the edges), but it did the job.

Exposition, or the teasing out of a character’s back story without being too obvious about it, is a fascinating craft. Some scriptwriters will go to extraordinary lengths dotting in tiny touches of colour that eventually add up to the TV equivalent of a pointillist masterpiece. Then there are those such as David Kane, who, for Max Raban, seemed to say to hell with it, let’s just get all the people he knows to tell him lots of stuff he should know about himself already. Midnight Man was a drama that scoffed at subtlety and in some ways was the better for it. For Max was a man about to trip over a government conspiracy involving anti-terrorist death squads. And once that helter-skelter ride got underway the broad brush strokes ensured we knew exactly where we were in terms of the maverick good guy, and so could spend our time, like him, trying to figure out what the baddies were up to.

So it’s night-time, the city’s a horrible place, James Nesbitt’s stubble is bristling and he is rifling through bins looking grumpy. For one depressing second, it looked as if Midnight Man was going to be Murphy’s Law, the offcuts. This time Nesbitt is not a cynical, flawed, but fundamentally good policeman. He is a cynical, flawed, but fundamentally good journalist called Max. It’s strange to find journalist heroes on TV: they are rarely portrayed as seekers of truth, but rather scumbags. Max only roots through rubbish because his glittering career in words is (temporarily) over. He revealed his source in a government scandal, who killed herself. Ever since, to keep the cash flowing, he sends scandalous (and very literal) rubbish to his editor, who is more the amoral journo scum-bag we’re familiar with – wouldn’t it be terrible if journalists were ever portrayed as human beings?

And wouldn't it be great if only journalism was as exciting and easy as it was for Max. Having been tossed the bone by his editor pal, he was tailing a lap dancer who was meant to be having an affair with a Cabinet minister. They were conducting this affair, supposedly discreetly, in a mews house – except that the Cabinet minister opened the door and greeted his adulterous paramour with a hug and kiss in front of the cab driver. Among the rubbish, he found a handily discarded pregnancy-testing kit, and a mysterious piece of paper in Latin, with a reference to a headless man. Intuitively, Max tied the latter into the discovery of a headless corpse in London, a hunch amply confirmed when mysterious men in leather jackets, toting guns, started shadowing him. Despite everybody else's advice, he kept looking, and ended up at a right-wing think tank, Defence Concern, run by a slippery-looking Rupert Graves and his lovely, devoted assistant, Catherine McCormack. Implausibly, all the disparate stories and leads joined up to make one giant story. Why does television portray print journalism so lazily?

Fortunately for Max, dragging around half a ton of clichés didn’t seem to slow him down much. But then fate did intervene on his behalf rather a lot. Such as when a bunch of youths beat up the spook who was stalking him, and then sold the man’s phone and ID to him for 50 quid. Then to add to his luck, the head baddie came up and introduced himself in a café – which certainly saved Max the trouble of having to track him down. Max, in his floppy sunhat, asked people questions, got direct answers and great quotes. He bribed a lap dancer not with cash but a sandwich. No obfuscating police press officer for Max – the desk sergeant at the cop shop sung like a canary: “My inspector thinks it looks like one of those honour killings.”

But of course the death of a young man called Majid (was he Muslim?) wasn’t an honour killing; ITV wanted us to be educated, so we were treated to a worthy few minutes of a grieving family insisting that Majid wasn’t “a fanatic”. We hadn’t thought he was: he was a kid who was shot in the head after playing football. On the 'ead, Naneen! Off the 'ead, Naneen! It’s odd having a drama imputing a kind of bigotry on to its audience, a bigotry it didn’t hold. If, as the drama insisted, so many people of a certain group and political persuasion had been killed, a newspaper – many newspapers – would be investigating it. This was clearly another drama straining to say important, predictably crowd-pleasing things about our post 9/11 or 7/7 world: echoes of David Kelly’s suicide, Islamophobia and the encroachment of a police state were stirred in. There was a bizarre credence given to the conspiracy theories to which Max subscribed (and imparts to his daughter as bedtime stories): the State was killing people it sees as undesirable.

From here on, everything ran pretty much according to the book: Max got warned off by heavies, everybody told him he was wasting his time (no one wants to listen; if it was Woodward and Bernstein, maybe, but not Nesbitt), the security services and the Americans were vaguely implicated in some over-arching conspiracy, and the devoted assistant, despite her initial dismissals, began to suspect he was on to something. Max's big lead is having an affair with her married boss. “I’m in it for the sex, not the washing,” she trilled – such an egregious line confirmed that this was one of those dramas in which characters spoke and behaved in no way believably. We even got an old friend: the scene where she downloads information from a computer against the clock, as the baddie heads back towards his desk (cf Mission: Impossible, the recent Iron Man and every other episode of Spooks ever).

Right at the end, things perked up with the arrival of Reece Dinsdale, cold-eyed and charmless as ever, as the man behind all the gruesomeness: a government security man who reckons that a few headless corpses are a small price to pay to keep the public safe from terror. He made a call on his mobile, and next thing you knew, Max's missus was being shot through the head. The evil state assassins having ripped off the same technique as Javier Bardem’s lumbering killer in the Coen brothers’ brilliant movie No Country for Old Men, with guns that pump whooshingly quiet bullets into foreheads. You had to say that this was keeping the public safe as we usually understand it.

It is, you'll gather, nonsense knocked off from any number of conspiracy dramas, from Bird of Prey and Edge of Darkness in the Eighties to State of Play in this decade. The whole thing's as bonkers as a pair of amorous foxes in the garden. Still, if you accept its ridiculous plot Midnight Man is gripping (if only to see where the next credibility-stretching twist is going to come from) and no one does wry and tortured like the talented Nesbitt. It remains to be seen whether this can be sustained over two more episodes. I’m inclined to think that one hour in the frenetic but sadly predictable world of “trashmeister” Max will prove enough. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong, probably with a denouement that will surely see Nesbitt placed in danger in paralysing daylight. But I bet he’ll still file a first-class front page – and overcome his fingerphobia.

After my initial disappointment that Women in Black (BBC2) wasn't Men in Black but with chicks, I found it very interesting. Film-maker Amani Zain travelled to Yemen for the first in what promises to be an engrossing series exploring a largely overlooked side of Islamic culture, that of its women’s relationship with fashion and fun. Zain’s aim was to “show the world that Muslim women are not shapeless black blobs”, and in that she certainly succeeded. You get to shop a lot, at the souk and the lovely new mall. And back at home you get to hang out with the girls, do each other's hair and makeup, try on the things you bought at the souk. Thursday night is party night. That means making a special effort with the hair and makeup, getting lots of girls round, burning lots of incense, eating lots of chocolate cake. Oh, and getting totally wazzed off your baps on qat, a stimulant that makes you feel wildly euphoric, and which in many countries is considered to be a class A drug. It looks like a brilliant time. Who needs men?

Although no one could doubt the affection and admiration she felt for the traditional way of life in the female-only quarters of her uncle’s house in Yemen, at times Zain seemed too eager to point out how wonderful life is behind the veil while ignoring the disadvantages. Especially as she said herself she wouldn’t want to be there full-time. And one also had to wonder if for these particular Muslim women life was good because they were fortunate enough to be wealthy. Wouldn’t it have been interesting, for instance, to contrast their lives with that of the poor seamstress to whom Zain paid a pittance to make up a dress – from fabric on which our film-maker had happily splurged more than 40 times that amount?

So this is not a scholarly programme about women in Islam: it's more Glamour magazine, in fact. Amani's family is clearly not representative of most people in Yemen: she's the first to admit they're posh, they've got drivers and cooks, they can afford all the qat they can chew. But it is an honest picture of one woman's dual existence, and as an insider Amani gets access to things no outsider would. She's also funny. And very into clothes. Maybe a better title would have been something like, Oh My God, I Love Your Veil!

Inside the Medieval Mind rolled to an end last night, with Professor Robert Bartlett musing, at what these days counts as extreme length, on the grotesque inequalities and cruelties of medieval society, illustrated with lots of shots of fire, blood and threateningly coiled ropes, in blurry close-up. The illustrative imagery was often gorgeous, but unimaginative. The Black Death and Edward II's poker up the bum both got illustrated by clouds of blood floating in water, and the overall impression was that the big difference between the Middle Ages and the modern world is that they weren't very good at focusing their cameras.

The other thing I didn't like about this series was the readings from medieval texts. For some reason, these were done by the most flat-toned, dreary actors they could employ, when everybody knows that back then people spoke like Charlton Heston. But overall, Bartlett has been – or, rather, has been allowed to be – a tremendously thoughtful, provocative and entertaining guide to the period, and this has been one of the most enjoyably intelligent things I can remember in many years. It's like we've emerged from the Dark Ages.