Spoiler alert: this blog is for viewers of Unforgotten on ITV on Thursdays. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the first episode.
Welcome to Unforgotten, the drama where the past just won’t stay buried.
Writer Chris Lang’s inspiration came from recent high-profile historical crimes and a curious feeling of sympathy he felt for old men suddenly under the media spotlight for decades-old alleged offences.
“I kept asking myself what it must be like for someone who is convicted of a crime 30 or 40 years old, what it must be like to have lived a whole life effectively pretending to be something but you’re not.”
Operation Yewtree casts its shadow once again.
What remains
When human remains are discovered in the ruins of 27 Arlingham Place, Willesden, London DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DS Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) work the case with the scantest of evidence. Once they establish foul play they spend the rest of the episode chasing after the victim’s identity. It’s a daunting task given the timeframe the body might have been buried for.
“Could be talking 5,000 years,” says Rawlins the forensics guy. Do we need CSI or Time Team?
The cops
Your typical TV plod partnership is defined by conflict but Cassie and Sunny happily disrupt that convention. There’s no seething resentment, sexual tension or substance abuse to resolve and they both seem pretty happy with the other. If anything you’d call it an older sister-younger brother vibe between them and neither looks like ripping off their badge and going rogue anytime soon.
The investigation
27 Arlingham Place has been a private home, a dole office and a homeless hostel in its time so some heavy human traffic has passed through its doors.
After forensics discover a car key near the remains, the serial number narrows it down to a car manufactured in 1965. They eventually trace its gutted husk back to a farm building. In a skip nearby they discover a bag with a comb, a shirt and a 1976 diary. James Niall Sullivan is the name and we have our victim, who has been missing since July 1976.
There are a list of names and phone numbers scribbled in the diary, too, and we follow four of those potential suspects as they go about their present-day lives.
Sir Philip Cross
We join Sir Philip sipping champagne in Westminster at the moment of his greatest triumph. He is made the government’s entrepreneur czar – a position with clout, prestige and a lordship thrown in. He’s a bit of an Alan Sugar – a working-class boy made good with a disarming media-friendly bluntness. He celebrates with his wife Shirley and his lawyer daughter Belle, although his son Josh seems more concerned with getting the old man’s name with his new title on his company’s letterhead.
“Never asked my old for a brass farthing,” Philip rebukes him “Wouldn’t have dared.”
Yes, your lordship, we get it – you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. But how many people achieve his career altitude without piling a few skeletons in the closet or, I don’t know, underneath a homeless hostel?
Lizzie Wilton
It’s a short enough journey from Westminster to White City but Lizzie’s life could barely be further removed from Sir Philip’s. While helping her husband Ray run a community football team for local youths, she forms a relationship with promising student Curtis as he prepares for his GCSEs, plying him with pizza and John Steinbeck.
A plaque in the team’s changing room gives us some background on the Wiltons.
In memory of Michael Ray Wilton 1991-2006
Beloved and only son of Elizabeth and Ray.
Always in our hearts.
So Lizzie is no stranger to tragedy but no clue yet as to what her connection is with Jimmy or Arlingham Place.
Robert Greaves
As Father Robert pelts along in his motor with boyband music blasting from the stereo he looks like England’s most carefree priest. There’s a loving wife at home, two grownup daughters and an adult education class for deprived women keeping him busy, along with the usual parish business. Overall the impression is of someone who is maddening to live with, often bullish but whose heart is in the right place – nothing sinister to see here.
And yet there is that Father Ted style discrepancy in the accounts that Geoff from the diocese keeps on badgering him about. There’s £2,000 unaccounted for from the past three years and the look on Robert’s face after Geoff leaves him suggests that this one is not easily explained.
Eric Slater
Elderly wheelchair user Eric struggles to cope with his wife Claire’s dementia in their bungalow in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Their son Matt thinks they are fine where they are but it’s his brother Leslie who spends time with them, sees their mother’s deterioration and worse, the state of the toilet. He’s been suggesting sheltered housing to them for some time but Eric won’t hear of it.
After Claire scalds herself in the kitchen she tells Eric she just wants to be looked after. She knows she’s not safe and he knows it too yet he tells her desperately: “We can’t leave.” He is hiding something, but what?
First impressions
Unforgotten is clearly a slow burner so I’m not worried that there is no jawdropper of a scene, pyrotechnics or shock twist – not every show needs to be Line of Duty. There’s nothing showy about Nicola Walker’s work – she’s an economical actor with a powerful presence who can play tough yet fragile as well as anyone.
The show will live and die though on the stories of the core four suspects and whether or not it conjures up the “emotional anomaly” Chris Lang talks about of the sympathy for someone whose life is turned upside down by some horrendous act in their past. I’m intrigued to know how Philip, Lizzie, Robert and Eric’s pasts intersect and how they ended up in Jimmy’s diary.
What are your thoughts? Has it hooked you yet?
Notes & queries
Yes, that is One Direction’s Story Of My Life Father Robert sings along to in his car. No one is condoning it but it does not qualify as a historical crime.
“Is a crime less serious because time’s passed?” Cassie certainly thinks so but with significant police resources already expended on this long-forgotten crime you have to imagine she’ll encounter some resistance from bean counters further up the food chain at some point.
“I don’t ever remember being fucking asked!” She may not be a cleric but Grace testifies like a preacher on being married to a man who gives all their possessions away.
Underneath the polite smiles at dinner there’s a masterclass in passive aggression from Robert when he brushes off Ellie and Tom’s objections to getting married in church. As his wife points out he’s got a knack of getting his own way.
Cassie becomes the latest in a long line of artists to cover Bobby Hebb’s Sunny but for some reason her partner doesn’t seem too thrilled with the rendition.
