CHRISTOPHER STEVENS REVIEWS LAST NIGHT'S TV

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS REVIEWS LAST NIGHT’S TV: This hair-raisingly scary thriller is ruined by its clichéd detective

Wolf (BBC1)

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Shadow Of Truth (BBC4)

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For the first time ever in this column, a show is being awarded two ratings, five stars and two stars — because half the episode was brilliant and the other half was mostly rubbish.

And if you think that’s confusing, so was Wolf (BBC1). Parallel stories, a few days apart, dripped with menace and blood, but so far there’s nothing to connect them except a runaway dog and a collection of men with staring eyes.

What makes Wolf unmissable are the scenes with Juliet Stevenson as brittle, bullying Matilda, who arrives at her grand country house in the Welsh Marches with hubby Oliver (Owen Teale) and their highly strung daughter, Lucia (Annes Elwy).

When a couple of plainclothes policemen knock on the door, warning of a killer on the loose, Matilda naturally invites them in for tea. ‘Milk and sugar?’ she asks, ‘one lump or two?’ — and by the way, she’s not sure whether she ought even to mention it, but the phone line has been cut off.

Also, she’s a little concerned that some local prankster has been draping animal entrails over a tree in the garden. At least, she hopes they are animal entrails.

Sacha Dhawan and Iwan Rheon play the ‘detectives’ as though this is a spin-off from Inside No. 9, with lots of emphasis on small talk and inappropriate jokes. We guess long before Matilda that they are not at all what they claim to be 

And if you think that’s confusing, so was Wolf (BBC1). Parallel stories, a few days apart, dripped with menace and blood, but so far there’s nothing to connect them except a runaway dog and a collection of men with staring eyes

The tension of this horror movie set-up is magnified by the maniacal politeness of this terribly English family, until every line is both hair-raisingly scary and deliriously comical.

Sacha Dhawan and Iwan Rheon play the ‘detectives’ as though this is a spin-off from Inside No. 9, with lots of emphasis on small talk and inappropriate jokes. We guess long before Matilda that they are not at all what they claim to be.

If Wolf were as straightforward as this, it would have the makings of an instant classic. But the narrative constantly flips forward by several days, to the overblown and clichéd story of a maverick policeman obsessed by the disappearance of his young brother, whose body was never found.

When Jack is suspended from duty, as all good mavericks are after a loved one vanishes, he tracks down another convicted offender — lank grey hair, yellow teeth, the works. By now, I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all the creepy weirdos

DI Jack Caffery (Ukweli Roach) spends every free minute staking out the house of the chief suspect — his next-door neighbour, a convicted sex offender with lank grey hair and yellow teeth. The neighbour retaliates by leaving dismembered Action Men on the doorstep.

Lorra laffs of the night 

For the 75th anniversary of the NHS, Bill Bailey commissioned a picture of Scottish paramedic Araf from photographer Brock Elbank on Extraordinary Portraits (BBC1). 

Brock compared Bill to Cilla Black, setting him up on a blind date. Bill was aghast: ‘I’m nothing like Cilla!’ 

Jack sleeps in his brother’s room, which he has turned into a shrine, and has endless feverish dreams about finding the killer. In an effort to attract his attention, his girlfriend Veronica (Kezia Burrows) pretends to have cancer. Naturally, he dumps her — if there’s one thing a melodramatic narcissist doesn’t have time for, it’s other people’s self-pity.

When Jack is suspended from duty, as all good mavericks are after a loved one vanishes, he tracks down another convicted offender — lank grey hair, yellow teeth, the works. By now, I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all the creepy weirdos.

There is no shortage of creepy weirdos in Shadow Of Truth (BBC4), a five-part true-crime documentary unravelling the hunt for a schoolgirl’s killer in Israel. It’s all in Hebrew, with subtitles, but well worth the effort.

Tair Rada was a 13-year-old in the Golan Heights when she was dragged into a school bathroom cubicle and stabbed to death, in 2006.

A blundering police inquiry went wrong from the start, with reporters hearing of the murder before Tair’s parents had been told their daughter was dead. The pressure on officers to catch the killer was so intense that they were willing to grab at any suspect, and even called in a psychic.

When Ukrainian immigrant Roman Zadorov, the school handyman, confessed to the crime, the case appeared to be solved. But this is one of those convoluted real-life investigations, like Making A Murderer on Netflix, where the twists are stranger than fiction.

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