“Can you breathe? Shame that,” mutters DCI John Luther, handcuffing another faceless criminal, as a nation sighs in ecstasy. We all know that Luther (New Year’s Day, 9pm, BBC One) – about a cop with a malfunctioning moral compass – should have been forcibly retired at the end of the second series, shortly before its brain fell out and it resorted to serving up prettily kohled corpses and baddies lurking under beds. But its star Idris Elba is a lady-magnet who will definitely, possibly, perhaps be the next James Bond, and television is an idiot. So here he is again, wearily stalking the streets and smouldering ferociously in tweed. Like his spirit animal, Sherlock Holmes, our hero favours a “statement” coat that ratchets up the handsomeness and which could feasibly house a family of four.
Luther’s London is alive with cartoon maniacs wielding hammers, home-made explosives, or large suitcases into which they can stuff unsuspecting women who assumed the nice man had come to fix the fridge. This would certainly explain why our troubled detective looks permanently in need of a nap.
Here, he and his colleagues are in pursuit of a killer who gets his jollies puncturing victims with needles or relieving them of their eyeballs, and who wears a hoodie with built-in LED lights in order to outfox CCTV surveillance. Meanwhile, as Luther’s boss (Dermot Crowley) shuffles around looking like a man whose dog has died and house has been repossessed on the same day, Patrick Malahide’s cockney gangster is on the warpath, because no one has cast him in EastEnders and also because someone has kidnapped his son.
The new Luther, much like the old Luther, doesn’t deal in nuance. As the killer lines up his quarry, the soundtrack groans. Rudimentary questions abound: why does no one ever turn any lights on? Why is Luther’s house decorated like Dot Cotton’s kitchen after a hurricane has blown through it? (Poirot would never put up with this crap.) And why, when he has a brainwave and rushes off, leaving his colleagues dangling mid-sentence, don’t they shout after him: “Er, bonjour? I was in the middle of talking, you awful dickhead”?
And yet. Elba is, as always, excellent, even while doing comparatively little. His technique is to maintain a blank expression and sigh a lot while taking up as much physical space as possible. Watching Luther clamber into a car is like seeing a sleeping bag being stuffed back into its casing. Every now and then, he’ll kick a door in or smash a window with his fist, just to remind us what a hard bastard he is. But – in a welcome plot development that will surprise precisely no one – it is the return of an old friend, waving a gun, bleeding profusely and gently tickling his weak spot, that signals the return of the series’ long departed va-va-voom. Luther is left flailing as he’s drawn into a web of bloody mischief involving diamonds, outrageous financial demands and … a turkey skewer. It’s incredibly preposterous, of course, but ’twas ever thus. Luther’s back on screen and at long last he has been put in his place. All is right with the world.
