"Everyone is a murderer. You just have to meet the right person" - Jefferson Grieff
BBC1 pulled the big guns out for their recent drama Inside Man (created by Steven Moffat, directed by Paul McGuigan, and up on iPlayer). Stanley Tucci, David Tennant, Dolly Wells, and Lydia West make for an excellent cast and even Dylan Baker and Kate Dickie come along for the ride.
You have to take a leap of faith with some of the more elaborate scenarios dreamed up by Moffat but if you can manage that Inside Man makes for a tense, thoughtful, pacy, highly watchable show. At times it's very moving, sometimes it's chilling, and, perhaps a bit oddly, it's quite funny in places. Because the subject matter is not particularly amusing.
Jefferson Grieff (Tucci), a former Professor of Criminology, is on death row in America for killing his wife (though we learn, just to flesh out his character a bit, that he also ate his mum's feet). He may be a killer but he's highly intelligent and very articulate and he uses those skills to help solve other crimes - if they're deemed to have a sufficient amount of moral worth!
He's not far short of Hannibal Lecter. His death row sidekick is Dillon (Atkins Estimond), a man who killed fourteen, or is it fifteen, women. Dillon has an excellent memory and 'works' as Grieff's recorder during his interviews although, in a typical Moffat line, he complains that Grieff makes death row sound a bit depressing.
It all feels a long way from leafy English suburbia where Harry Watling (Tennant) serves as a friendly local vicar, or "fucking vicar". When he picks up his son Ben's (Ben played by Louis Oliver) maths tutor Janice (Wells) from the local station (they've called it Norbridge but it's actually Godalming, later the Welcome Break service station at Fleet turns up) she's just helped journalist Beth (Lydia West) out of a harassment situation on the train and Beth, always eager for a story, wants to interview her.
Seemingly quite desperately. Janice doesn't want to be interviewed. She lives a quiet life, living alone and enjoying solo hiking holidays. She seems to enjoy a good relationship with Ben, Harry, and Harry's wife Mary (Lyndsey Marshall) but when ever eager to please Harry agrees to hide his verger Edgar's (Mark Quartley) porn - in the form of memory stick - from his mum he makes a big mistake.
At The Vicarage, Janice finds the memory stick and uses it to try and set up a computer. The memory stick contains child porn. Bizarrely, Harry decides to protect Edgar - believing him to be a suicide risk. In fact, Harry goes to extreme lengths to do so. Which makes things much worse for everyone around.
Soon, it's not just Harry making very strange decisions. But why are these people acting so irrationally while, at times, remaining calm enough to make quips at each other and, ultimately, how will the makers of Inside Man tie the stories of Harry, of Grieff, and of Beth together?
There's some great dialogue, of course, and Tucci gets most of the best lines though I did quite enjoy it when Mary described Harry's Christianity as a "half-wit fairy tale", there's a bizarre side story about a man who found an unsolicited sum of money deposited into his bank account every time he has sex with his wife, and there's a great use of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's heartbreakingly lovely At The Break Of Day.
Some of Grieff and Dillon's death row chats are delivered up as almost comic sketches which brings a very literal meaning to the phrase 'gallows humour' but, somehow, it all works just right. Inside Man tackles themes of altruism, atonement, sainthood, and sacrifice and makes us ask ourselves what we may be capable of in extreme circumstances. Most of all though, it was just a bloody good story, written brilliantly, and acted out superbly.
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