Article #7761

Cush Jumbo is excellent in Apple’s unsettling tale of police corruption. But the former Time Lord, whose death-stare is turned up to 11, is this show’s heart

’Ello, ’ello. What’s goin’ on ’ere, then? Criminal Record, is it? A second series, you say? Well, strike a light, guv, cos here it comes, nee-nawing through London’s perp-spattered streets with another investigational pea-souper. In the thick of it, once again, is DCI Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), baring his lower teeth while glowering at us through the windscreen of his Skoda Malfeasance.

Not that Capaldi’s peerlessly unsettling presence is the Apple TV drama’s sole distinguishing feature, mind. There is its depiction of London as a city impervious to natural light, with conversations, interrogations and “roughings-up” conducted against a backdrop of faulty streetlights and flickering tower-block TV sets. There is its portrayal of systemic corruption, with everything from the CID’s dimpled glass doors to the foreheads of its junior plods slick with an oily sheen of venality. And there are the questions it poses re the nature of control, with DS June Lenker (the ever-excellent Cush Jumbo) tormented by notions of who is in charge, and who ought to be.