Of the many great British TV detectives DCI George Gently (BBC One) was always the one least likely to depart our screens quietly. For if ever there was a policeman who liked to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” it was he. (One even wonders whether Alan Hunter, the Norfolk crime writer who created Gently in the early Fifties, intended his name as an echo of the then recently deceased Dylan Thomas’s great poem Do not go gentle into that good night, so redolent is his character of it).
So it seemed appropriate that the “last ever” episode of the BBC’s Sixties-set series based on the character would bring Gently (Martin Shaw) full circle to where it started out in 2007. Back then this old school copper, a war hero who’d fought with the Eight Army in Italy, was raging against the dying of the one source of light in a very dark life – his adored wife, Isabella, who’d just been murdered by a gangster.
Ten years on, in this dark and mournful finale, it turned out Isabella (Maria Tecce) had actually been murdered as part of a greater conspiracy that sealed Gently’s fate, ultimately, as well. Of course, there was a complicated story of police and political corruption, and ruthless MI5 operatives, to pick through in order to get us to that conclusion. A story, written by Shetland and DCI Banks scripter Robert Murphy, that delighted in exploring the Right-Left divisions of the time with cleverly topical nods to the politics of today.
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