The Bay (ITV) is Broadchurch in Morecambe. I would even bet half my David Tennant memorabilia collection that was the makers’ pitch in its entirety. Why not? It’s perfect. I would have bought it as a commissioner, and as a viewer I was entirely sold.
We open with mother of teens – and party girl – Lisa (Morven Christie) being collected by her mates for a grand night out that ends with a nightclub, karaoke and a quick shag with a stranger called Sean in an alley. All the best times end with sinking a chlamydia shot before bed.
But what’s this? The next day, we see her pulling up at the police station. Where she works. She is actually DS Lisa Armstrong, dedicated police detective. She had just curled her hair and fooled us all.
There won’t be time for any tonging for some weekends to come, however. Teenage twins Holly and Dylan have gone missing, the local force is out in force and Lisa is appointed their family’s liaison officer.
In keeping with statutory law, as it pertains to Television Drama (section 3b: ITV; subsection vii: post-watershed, weekday), she is lumbered with a new detective (Med, played by Taheen Modak) to train brusquely-but-fondly in the ways of detectivery. They are greeted at the door of the anxious parents’ home by a needlessly hostile older relative (in this case, the twins’ grandmother, played by Tracie Bennett, who gives the best hostility in the business). Narrative formalities out of the way (“Why are you here?” “Why aren’t you all out looking for them?” “We just want them back!”), Lisa and Med settle down with the mother, Jess (a strikingly good turn from Chanel Cresswell, who won a Bafta for her role as Kelly Jenkins in This Is England) to explain police procedures, extract details about the twins and wait for their father to come home. When he does, he turns out to be (mark your best guess below, there will not be prizes):
1. A man, just like any other man; a new character we’ll get to know and will or won’t turn out to have anything to do with anything.
2. A pie.
3. Sean.
It is Sean. And if you didn’t rub your hands, squeal: “Ooh, lovely!” and curl up a little more comfortably on the sofa the moment he stepped through the door, well, you’re a better person than me.
After that, we were away. Lisa’s teenagers were shown to be involved in some funny business that may be connected to Holly and Dylan’s disappearance? Check! CCTV outside the nightclub showing Lisa and Sean up to their funny business on the night of Holly and Dylan’s disappearance? Check! Lisa disappearing the funny-business footage and hoping this doesn’t have terrible ramifications for the case and her career? Sean unable to account for his whereabouts for an hour (less than 10 minutes of which vagina-witness Lisa could provide if she had to) on the night his children went missing? The sense that events are not unfolding organically, but that the writer is wilfully withholding information until the page number is right, as the mother mentions that Holly and Dylan are not Sean’s, grandma hints that summat’s not right in the household and is not pressed on this, and various people reckon there have been rows and social-worker involvement – and that Sean’s a wrong ’un? Check, check and check again.
As Jane Austen almost said, three or four gobbets of dysfunction in a small seaside town is the very thing to work on. The Bay is what it is and you can’t fault it. It’s a satisfying knotty, plotty hour. You believe in everyone and everything just enough to get by. A good time over the next few weeks will surely be had by all except the poor cockle pickers, who are the first to come across the not-entirely-unexpected twist in the last few scenes. And it’s got Christie and Bennett in it, the latter criminally underused in recent years and the former coming pleasingly into her own kingdom, it seems, with recent work such as The Replacement and Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence under her belt.
In short, come on into The Bay. The water’s lovely.
