How Christmassy the festive episode of a murder drama can really be is a tricky question, but this year’s Vera special doesn’t worry about it too much. One of the suspects has a tree up and they’re doing Secret Santa in the police station but, apart from that, the veteran ITV crime drama continues as normal. As DCI Vera Stanhope, Brenda Blethyn forcefully potters around the salt-swept Northumberland countryside until a killer is unmasked. All is as it should be.
Five old school friends gather in a house on Holy Island – Lindisfarne – for their regular reunion, with the fifth arrival being a man we see summoning his courage in his car, before he floors it along the road from the mainland that’s only viable at low tide. The morning after a boozy, eventually bad-tempered catch-up, the man is found dead. Stanhope quickly deduces that this was murder, not suicide.
So a crime has been committed, but in every episode of Vera there is a different whodunnit that requires your guesswork. Peruse the cast list and you will find numerous veteran character actors in guest roles – it’s guaranteed that at least one is about to viciously murder the north-east England accent. Playing a geordie character is difficult enough for thesps whose resting voice is RP, but the challenge of trying to finesse Newcastle a little further north into Northumberland is often too much, with heinous results. Who’s committing a vocal atrocity this time around? It would be ungallant to name them, but their effort to maintain control of their vowel sounds is like someone bear-hugging a sack full of pigs.
Anyway, back to the case itself. It seems we have a finite list of perpetrators. It’s assumed that one or more of the surviving quartet of pals must have offed their old mate, because by the time he was killed, Holy Island was surrounded by water for the night. Strangely, though, most of the group soon melt into the background as it becomes clear that someone else surreptitiously visited the island and left again, and the victim’s past is where the truth about his death lies.
It’s customary for crime dramas to disinter painful buried secrets, but this plot really is backwards looking: everything is about what happened some time ago, with all the key events having taken place in 1982. That means the episode is awfully talky, and reliant on characters who could have told something in scene four waiting until scene 11 to say it, because otherwise they’d spoil the story.
This is usually how it is with Vera, a show that has succumbed to the lure of the perfectly timed revelation. Just when Stanhope needs to know something new, one of her team pipes up with fresh info. It’s how all whodunnits work to some extent, but Vera really could do more to disguise the mechanics: several of the junior cops spend all their time at their desks, waiting for their turn to magically receive the phone call or email that pushes the investigation along, causing Stanhope to move a mugshot emphatically from one part of the office corkboard to another.
What that does mean, however, is that the pace never slows. For pie-eyed Boxing Day viewers, Vera is pleasantly impossible to second-guess. Three sherries down, there is no way you are going to keep up with who used to go out with whom, who died in 1982, who else died in 1982 that everyone’s keeping quiet about, who was seen in a pub on the night of the murder, and what explosive truths the victim’s upcoming autobiographical novel was likely to contain. If you don’t identify the killer as soon as they appear, which in fairness you may well do if you’ve seen a few detective series in your time, you can just let it all chug past you.
Apart from the alluringly windy locations, Vera’s appeal is all wrapped up in Blethyn. Squinting and bustling in her trademark bucket hat and sensible long mac – an outfit that pitches her halfway, wardrobe wise, between Columbo and Paddington – Blethyn’s Stanhope rarely does much intensive sleuthing and is more of an irascible manager, but those who cross her soon regret it. More than one authority figure wishes they hadn’t patronised her in this story, and her use at one point of “pet” as a term of endearment to dismiss an assertive lawyer is so brutal, the coroner nearly has to be called.
Blethyn’s natural authority has kept Vera going for more than a decade, and she can do the accent as well. She is well worth celebrating.
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Vera Christmas special was on ITV1 and is available on ITVX. Vera is available for streaming on BritBox in Australia.
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