TV review: First of the forensics still breathing

Silent Witness, which returned to TV One on Saturday, is quite a phenomenon - albeit of the Captain Cook's axe variety.

The first series was broadcast 12 years ago, which makes this a stunningly long-lived show, among the thicket of crime and forensics series that come and go.

It even predates the ubiquitous American CSI TV franchise by four years, so technically was in at the ground floor of our obsession with mining tiny clues from dead bodies, along with authors Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs.

Which is all very well, but is it any good? This is the 11th season of Silent Witness (another one has been made and it's still not cancelled), so it has lost much of its must-see cache. But it still is pretty lively telly.

Original pathologist Professor Sam Ryan (Amanda Burton) has long since been replaced by three cutter-uppers, Leo (William Gaminara), Harry (Tom Ward) and Nikki (Emilia Fox) - to good effect.

You might as well call it a totally different show, since the original series were heavily focused on Sam's private life, and on her somewhat abnormal but laudable determination to intrude upon the police's work, and, where possible, do it for them.

But despite the upheaval of the cast, the basic premise is the same: scientists going beyond the call of duty to see that justice is done. Naturally these are three damned attractive, and handily single scientists, and they're all marvellously liberal and idealistic, so that when they bend the rules - as they often do - you remain on their side.

What's harder to get your head around with this new casting is that all three of the pathologists should behave in this thrusting and often unprofessional way.

In traditional crime dramas, the pathologist's job is to find ingenious clues on the corpse in the beginning, and maybe even do some further flash research to provide vital pointers later in the investigation.

But that's all. (Most pathologists appear only a couple of times in your standard Inspector Morse or Touch of Frost, typically dressed in evening clothes and grumpy at being pulled away from some posh dinner.)

The freshness of the Sam Ryan character was that, in her passive- aggressive way, she insisted on pursuing each unsolved case herself, on the reasonable assumption that the police, a) did not care as much as she did about it, and b) were very often incompetent.

This was such a novelty that it carried the show for many seasons.

More than that, the character was based on a real-life pathologist, Professor Helen Whitwell. The series was created by former policeman Nigel McCrery, who had worked with Whitwell while serving on a murder squad. (He went on to co-create New Tricks, another, rather lighter police drama.)

So the point being made was that, based on real police experience, a single tenacious, courageous doctor could make a difference in solving crime.

Since the change of cast, however, we now take it as a televisual necessity for all pathologists to be so involved.

Tom and Nikki - with minimal restraint from their less headstrong boss Leo - are always butting their way into police investigations, and the police seem to expect this.

This is hardly realistic. Sam used to get in through force of personality and seniority, but Tom and Nikki are still wet behind the ears, so why the police suffer their hot-headed intrusions is never fully explained.

Heck, even in the glib American CSI shows, the boffins let the actual police on their teams do the police work.

But anyway, it's only telly, and it's elegantly entertaining, without making you curse if you miss it.

The first story - continuing this weekend - is about new evidence in a case everyone thought was solved. A woman is found murdered in a wrecked car. She turns out to be half of a murderous duo who, at random, knifed a mother of two years before.

The callous "dare you to kill the first person you see next!" crime had made this woman a Myra Hindley-grade hate figure, so there is no shortage of candidates to kill her. But it was Nikki's forensic evidence, controversial at the time, that got the woman a lenient sentence, and now new evidence is pointing to the woman being guiltier than she seemed.

Nikki is pursued by a hyper- stimulated gaggle of journalists, and by some elements in the police who aren't happy with her being involved in the case a second time.

Which, of course, she shouldn't be, but if this was just about people cutting up bodies, it wouldn't be much of a story, would it?

* What do you think? Post your comments below.

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