The return of a trusty old sidekick brings a new lease of life to ITV1's Vera
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Thirteen years and 13 series might as well be 13 decades in television. There are very few conceits, locales or characters that can stave off viewer fatigue for that long. Vera (ITV1), with Brenda Blethyn as the titular detective from Ann Cleeves’s crime novels, has survived – prospered, even – through steady evolution. Yes, she’s an older woman partial to assign people questions to get answers, but she knows when to reach for the ANPR or phone records.
But with the abrupt departure of Kenny Doughty as Vera’s sidekick Aiden Healy last time round, following on from the gap left by David Leon’s exit after series four, there’s as much interest for the seasoned Vera-phile in how the writers will keep the whole thing going as in the weekly mystery. Blethyn’s excellence as DCI Vera Stanhope is a given. What would Fast Love, the first of four feature-length episodes, do about the rest? The answer was that it sent Healy packing and welcomed Leon back.
There’s no easy plot chicanery for when an actor leaves or returns – you can always hear the clunk – and so Vera imagined that Healy had taken a post in Perth, Australia, and DI Ashworth (Leon) had returned as a clipboard-wielding bureaucrat from the office of policing. He was, apparently, there to observe why Vera and her team “lacked strategic direction”.
I assume this was an in-joke and it was a good one – so many people seem to leave the Northumberland and City CID, it suggested, that perhaps Vera and her eccentricities were the problem. So why not bring one of them back to investigate his own departure?
Whatever the whys and wherefores, however, it was undoubtedly good to have Leon back, and he soon took his rightful place upfront with Vera in the tatty Land Rover as a toothsome exposition-tennis partner. Because that’s how Vera works – it’s old-fashioned detective work portrayed in an old-fashioned way, with a pair of dogged sleuths, one unconventional, the other comparatively naive, who talk to each other as they drive places in order to explain to the audience what’s going on.
Together they picked their way through the murder of the week – in this case a market trader who’d rubbed almost everyone up the wrong way and then been run down. If the formula is contrived it is also highly effective: it not only allows plots as labyrinthine as Fast Love’s to be unravelled, but it gives ample time for subtle portrayals such as Blethyn’s to breathe. Time with Vera, no matter what murky mystery she’s investigating, is time well spent. Maybe that’s why Leon has come back.
