She is back. Marcella, with a “ch” sound in the middle. Anna Friel giving it everything, entertainingly and very watchably, as an unlikely and very uncoplike cop, remember? Who has blackout episodes in which she becomes angry and violent. She seems to be having one now. With a cut above her right eye, she is teetering on the edge, literally, up on the parapet of the roof of the building that she works in, with night-time London and its night-time sounds stretched out below. Don’t, Marcella with a ch, don’t jump …
But then, before she either does or doesn’t, we go back 12 days. That rooftop is where this is heading to, but where is it heading from? Some kind of building work, it looks like; a man with a drill and a very large drill-bit is making a hole in an internal wall. He hits something that isn’t plasterboard, pulls the drill out, and on the end of his very large drill-bit is … oh, a human ear.
“I know who that is,” DS Marcella tells DI Rav Sangha (Ray Panthaki), after the wall has been opened up and the body of a boy surrounded by toys is found. It is Leo, who went missing a while back. He was a school friend of Marcella’s son, who was supposed to walk home with Leo, but didn’t – and Leo never went home again.
Leo’s parents blame Marcella’s son, and Marcella, for their son’s disappearance, now murder. Does that make Marcella unsuitable to be a key member of the investigating team? Of course it doesn’t; you may remember from the first series that Marcella gets very close to her cases. Sometimes it is a very thin line between investigating officer, victim and accomplice, even.
Elsewhere, another boy is chained to a bed, scraping away at the wall, trying to free himself before bad dudes get to him. There is a paedophile thing going on, I’m afraid, and some seedy old men from the music industry in the 1970s. “It was a different era then,” one of them says, almost convincingly.
Marcella can do that – balance the utter ludicrousness with the odd curveball from the real world. There is even a Mike Ashley kind of figure, helicoptering around the place while his workers languish on minimum wages and zero-hours contracts. Get some real issues in there, and maybe people will take it seriously and not notice how tonto it is. Tonto it is, though. But rather delightfully so, certainly more of a hoot than David Hare’s state-of-the-nation thriller Collateral on the other side.
Another star/villain needs a mention: the score. The opening scene starts with a big percussive crash, and then there is more as Marcella strides through the office, through the fire doors and up the stairs. Boom, boom, boom, interspersed with a bit of echoey spookiness, an incorporated train noise when she is outside on the roof, and then a siren.
Does the boom, boom, boom have something to do with the beating of Marcella’s heart, maybe? I think I can feel my own heartbeat getting into sync. I may actually be being physiologically manipulated, as well as being directed what to think and how to feel. The rhythm increases in intensity, urgency, as she steps up on to the parapet, a scary haunting noise, a siren, metal screech, crescendoing …
And so it goes on. Menace for the baldhead dude, taking his anger out on a punchbag so he doesn’t do the same to a person; darkness for the paedophiles; haunting discord for Marcella’s blackout episodes; a rising, throbbing horror screech for the drilled-off ear.
I have often moaned about intrusive music before, when it spells out how we should be feeling. But this takes it to a whole new level. It is a bit like that audio description service that people with sight loss can get (and people without sight loss can get by mistake) by pressing a button on the remote of a digital television, where it explains what is happening on screen. This is an audio description sound-effects service, and there is no off button.
It goes beyond intrusive, to near-total sonic eclipse, so that the score sometimes seems to be the main event. Perhaps that is the way to deal with it and not get too angry (fading anger noises): think of it as a piece of electronic audio art, with a daft but entertaining video featuring Anna Friel. Now don’t jump please.
