Cardinal BBC2, 9pm ****
Scotland’s Home of the Year BBC Scotland, 8pm ***
DIXON of Dock Green was not a founding member. Neither was Lacey, though Cagney had her moments. Taggart could grump for Scotland, but you would hesitate to say he was in the MCC (Maverick Cop Club).
In today's TV schedules you can barely move for maverick cops. The latest of them made the big move last night from the boondocks of BBC4 to hip and happening BBC2.
John Cardinal is the name and teetering on the edge of a major emotional and career fall is the game.
It was a rum move by the schedulers. The Canadian crime drama has been a hit on BBC4, and heaven knows the main channels could do with new faces in these drama-starved virus times.
But this, the fourth series, is also the last. So if you were not already a fan, or you failed to heed the siren calls to catch up on iPlayer, this new six part run will be stuffed with spoilers.
Series three of Cardinal, based on the novels of Giles Blunt, ended with a psychiatrist warning our hero that he would never be able to outrun the darkness in his soul, and that he was now the most dangerous thing in the world, “a broken man with power”. He was not a very nice psychiatrist.
But surely Cardinal's cop partner, French-Canadian Lise Delorme, she of the bun and the alluring accent, could save him from the demons in his past?
There has long been a will-they-won’t-they about Cardinal and Delorme (yes, that ancient chestnut). Last night it looked like they might go mad and have a late night coffee together, only for murder most foul to call them back to duty. Make that kidnap and murder most foul. Someone was abducting what looked like random victims, but why?
From the off, Cardinal has not fought shy of grisly murders. Even so, this new psychopath was a particularly nasty sort.
Fortunately, Cardinal has reached the point when the personnel are more interesting than the perps, so we’ll stick with it if only to find out if Lise and Cardinal ever do have that coffee. We'll stay for the snow-packed landscape too. It always warms the cockles to see a place that is colder than here.
Scotland’s Home of the Year has now entered the second half of a ten-part series. At this stage of the competition the judges were wearing their likes and dislikes like comfy old slippers, and the tension was mounting along with the number of bifold doors.
Colour and patterns tend to press the buttons of the judges, as happened at the first stop in the northern Highlands heat: a period property renovation in Dornoch, complete with an annexe the owners had dubbed a “sitooterie”.
“Wow,” said tattooed lady/interior designer Anna Campbell Jones of the main building’s teal window frames, “that’s a bold colour choice.”
Architect/lecturer and Johnny Cash dress-alike Michael Angus said he really liked the colour; a most unusual move for him. The third judge, lifestyle blogger Kate Spiers, said she was on the fence about it. She did not specify what colour the fence was, which was probably just as well.
Next along was a rural new build near Thurso, home to a couple who said building a house from scratch had been grand but they would never do it again. There speaks almost everyone who has ever had the builders in.
There was another potential spat waiting to break out in the wall cupboard-free kitchen. “I do have rather strong feelings about wall cabinets,” said Angus. “Don’t like them.” Fortunately, Campbell Jones and Spiers agreed, so that kept the metaphorical blood off the walls.
The final entry was a revamp in Skelbo with views to Orkney. The owner and his wife, former Londoners, had inherited the property from his father and given it a substantial makeover. It was all going swimmingly with the judges until they came to a bookcase in which the contents had been arranged by, you’ve guessed it, colour. Thumbs up from Angus and Spiers, but Campbell Jones reckoned it would be a pain if you were trying to find something.
The Skelbo property inched it, with something for all the judges, from a huge attic that was home to a drumkit to the carrara marbled bathroom. Carrara marble – next year’s bifold doors, you wait and see. Next week: The Lothians and east.
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