TV review: Thorne: Sleepyhead

ANOTHER detective drama about a serial killer. How novel. And what, pray tell, is this one's gimmick? Well, opening with heavy breathing it initially seems as if Thorne (or Thorne: Sleepyhead as it is annoyingly called) will be the Wheezing Detective, as he lumbers after a petty thief in a slow chase scene. It's not that star David Morrissey is unfit - he's a fine figure of a man, 6ft 3in as the script carefully informs us. It's merely a way to indicate that in real life, running full-tilt for streets and streets will leave anyone out of breath. Thorne is not some superhuman crime solver, just a middle-aged policeman.

Its good casting for this adaptation of Mark Billingham's series: apparently Morrissey himself read the novel, Googled its author and discovered an interview where he had been asked to name the actor who could best portray his hero. Luckily he'd said David Morrissey and not Brad Pitt, so some time later, this dramatisation came to pass.

Sky One don't make their own dramas very often, which we should really complain about, except that when they do they're not usually very good. But you can tell that they've made an effort with this one, bringing in not just Morrissey but a fine supporting cast, including Eddie Marsan as another policeman, Aiden Gillen as a police medical examiner and Natascha McElhone as a doctor treating one of the victims. Curiously, though, this does tend to make me suspect all of them of being the serial killer, simply because you tend to assume that such good actors wouldn't be cast in smaller roles unless they dunnit.

Having wheezed his way to catching the thief, Thorne discovered a body nearby, which Gillen's doctor then revealed to be the latest young woman to be killed but appear to have died of a stroke. But the killer, naturally, makes a mistake, leaving the next one alive. Great, a witness! But unfortunately, she was suffering from locked-in syndrome, which means she was trapped, awake, in her body, unable to move anything but her eyes. Not so helpful.

It's certainly an intriguing twist on the witness who can't tell the detective what they know, but I'm less sure about the drama's attempt to convey the condition, by letting us hear the victim's thoughts. While she's saying things like: "Tom (Thorne] … you have kind eyes … why can't you hear me? I'm talking to you!" we see her lying there, frozen, with no sound coming out. It got across the effects of the syndrome, but risked seeming a bit silly.

Morrissey is never less than watchable and he brings a brooding presence to the role of Thorne. But, in this first episode at least, he didn't actually have a great deal to do other than procedural scenes.Getting to have a little more fun was Stephen Campbell Moore as a smug, sleazy consultant and possible suspect, who got to relish being a complete prat.

It's Gillen, though, whose presence reminds you of better things: chiefly The Wire, in which he played Tommy Carcetti. That series really was so groundbreaking that it has made every other police drama look feeble and silly by comparison, even a thoroughly decent one like Thorne which is perfectly good crime-solving stuff.

But it's a shame that our best actors can't be used for anything more radical or real.