Means Test

Cliché is the new black, or something like that. It certainly is with By Any Means, the BBCs newest Sunday night effort, which appears to try to break through the line of parody so hard that it comes back on itself in the realms of sheer tedium.

To whit, Jack Quinn (they should have give him a more macho name, like Jim Steel or John Ripper) operates his own team that does ‘off the books’ police work, given to them by Da Chief, portrayed in a dignified cameo by Gina McKee.

In this first episode, the mission is to take down a nasty gangster type who has managed to keep his hands clean of all the nasty deeds done on his orders. Thus, Jack works on getting a result with his colleagues: attractive Jessica Jones and tech geek Thomas Tomkins, who is nicknamed Tom Tom (do you SEE?). Naturally, the best way to ensnare our criminal friend, played with true scenery chewing style by Keith Allen, to make him lose his cool and fall into making a mistake. Because he’s a gangster and therefore prone to bouts of psychotic rage, especially when it comes to the wife who is half his age. Who would have thought?

It is all essentially like Hustle except with the intention of banging a villain up rather than scamming a few million, and like that other show, suffers from huge spades of style over substance. There’s rarely any real peril or reasons to care about any of the characters. Throw in a scene when Jack drives up to a council estate and is instantly met with a bunch of young scallies giving it the “fiver to mind your car” and I’m staggered I made it to the end, where the reveal is less twists and more “here’s some conversation we didn’t show you before”. A key piece of the, ahem, puzzle turns out to be the presence of John Henshaw, making a dignified cameo as a man with a heavy cold.

If I had to nail it down, it’s the sheer lack of conviction that did it for me. In a scene where Quinn bursts into the bad guy’s office and whips out a pistol to force the heavies to back off, you feel that Allen should have laughed and said ‘oh, do fuck off’. It’s not helped by the main actor being barely out of his mid 30s and thus seems a bit young to be leading a crack team of specialists in the quasi-legal fight against crime.

Still, by the end, the team gains another member and the quartet is complete for a series, one which if it carries on like this, will soon find itself set later and later in the schedules.