Strike: Career of Evil
Top Gear
Rating: 
The genius of J.K. Rowling is her knack for melding unlikely genres. Her Harry Potter series took the traditional boarding school story of Billy Bunter or Malory Towers, and transferred it to the fantasy world of Tolkien.
She pulled off the same trick again, writing under the pseudonym of ‘Robert Galbraith’, by combining film noir with Mills & Boon. The book is detective romance. Robert Mitchum from Farewell My Lovely tangled up with Ali MacGraw in Love Story.
In the TV version, Strike: Career Of Evil (BBC1), Tom Burke is the grizzled private eye Cormoran Strike, hard-drinking and damaged. Because J.K. doesn’t believe in subtle metaphors, the damage is literal — he’s only got one leg.
Strike: Career of Evil aired on BBC1 and can be described as detective romance and the combining of film noir with Mills & Boon
His devoted assistant Robin, the woman who can never admit she adores him, is played by Holliday Grainger.
Her main role is to be competent and long-suffering, though she made the most of her two big scenes — forcing her fiance to admit an affair, and coping with the memory of rape: ‘It was 20 bad minutes out of a whole life, and I am still the same person.’
Burke does a fine job of conveying his injury, wincing with pain when he runs. But the acting is wasted, because too much time of every episode is spent on shots of the detective rubbing ointment into his stump before going to bed alone.
Everyone sleeps alone on this show. We see them each night, in lonely hotel rooms, slumped in office armchairs, crashed out across desks or comatose in pubs.
Strike and Robin slept together only in the most technical sense, when the drama sent them careering round the Lake District in a rusty Land Rover. She curled up on the back seats overnight, he hunkered down in his grubby overcoat behind the wheel.
If the duo ever shared a bed, the story would sputter out. The plot needs this unresolved love interest: the characters are not strong enough to sustain a straightforward crime mystery.
We’re supposed to believe that Strike is on the trail of an old adversary, who taunts him by sending a dismembered human leg in a gift box.
Despite the lack of natural chemistry between the presenters of Top Gear, their love of motoring shines through, making for an informative show
This is so hilariously over-the-top that it became slightly distracting. Stupid puns kept springing to mind: ‘Best foot forward, Strike!’ ‘Step on it!’ ‘You’re stumped now!’ ‘Quick, leg it!’
For a non-stop stream of infantile jokes, we had the return of Top Gear (BBC2), with Matt LeBlanc’s one-liners all laboriously scripted — and the team’s choreographed laughter well rehearsed, too. This post-Clarkson car show would be better if it ditched the pretence that Matt and his co-drivers, Rory Reid and Chris Harris, were best mates with a natural chemistry. They’re not.
All three are good at conveying their love of motoring, though. In their hands, the drag races, lap times, off-road challenges and hill climbs are not mere vehicles for comedy but informative about the cars.
Reid proved that, if you want a sports car that accelerates well on the motorway, rather than hitting 190mph on a runway, you’d be better off with a top-of-the-range Jaguar than a budget McLaren or a souped-up Mustang. Such information may be useless to me really, but I felt the wiser for being told.
As always, the maniacal German racing driver Sabine Schmitz stole the show, cackling with glee as she tore round a stock car circuit with two cars chained behind hers.
There’s nothing scripted about her laughter. LeBlanc looks terrified of her, and no surprise.