The Jetty, review: clichéd and confusing, this crime drama is a soggy summer washout
You can tell The Jetty (BBC One) is bad by the fact that the BBC is shoving it out on a Monday in July, but episode one provides confirmation. What is odder: a detective with so much time on her hands that she can spend it looking for crimes which nobody has reported, or a scene in which a troubled schoolgirl does something unmentionable to a horse? (I won’t go into detail here, but think of Rebecca Loos and that pig.)
Let’s start with the detective. Ember Manning (a functional Jenna Coleman) sets out to investigate an arson (ember, arson…) in the lakeside Lancashire town where she has spent her entire life. The boathouse has gone up in flames, soon after being bought by a wealthy Londoner. This owner, entirely reasonably, expects the police to look for the perpetrator. “I’m afraid that arsons are nearly impossible to solve, so we don’t actually spend too much time on them… I wish I could tell you otherwise, but then I’d just be pandering to your massive sense of entitlement,” Ember replies, and delivers a lecture about tourists pricing out the locals. This doesn’t seem terribly professional.
Soon, a pregnant 16-year-old lands on Ember’s windscreen from a height, and our heroine decides to investigate if the father of the child was an older man who engaged this unfortunate girl in underage sex – although she was already suspicious before the fall owing to some business with the girl and a Cornish pasty. At the same time, our detective joins forces with a dreadful true-crime podcaster to investigate the cold-case disappearance of a 17-year-old schoolgirl (the horse enthusiast). Ember is a police officer, but has to keep pleading with this podcaster for help in solving the crime.
Teenage sex is the running theme here. Ember had her own daughter at 17. Series creator Cat Jones clearly wanted to write about grooming, blurred lines and the vulnerability of girls, about the secrets harboured by close communities, but it has ended up packaged in a drama that does all the wrong things.
It fails on the basics, which isn’t Jones’s fault: badly lit and with dialogue that is sometimes hard to decipher. But the plot in the opening hour is such a mish-mash that I twice checked to see if I had started watching a later episode by mistake. Then there are the female-led drama tropes: of course there is a scene in episode two in which Ember walks in the house, grabs some booze from the fridge and drinks it standing up in the kitchen, because that is what women in domestic thrillers must do. And the detective drama tropes too: the posh family in the big house (obviously up to no good, because they are the posh family in the big house), the rookie police sidekick, the dreams and/or flashbacks. They’ve also chucked in a psychic (played by Amelia Bullimore) for good measure.
I think we’re supposed to admire Ember’s maverick approach to policing, which seems to involve no official policing whatsoever but a lot of covertly extracting information from schoolchildren and haranguing people in the pub. Her superiors certainly approve. One admiring boss says: “No authorisation to investigate, no case file, no cautioning of suspects – but put all that to one side and it’s not a bad piece of police work.”
The Jetty begins on BBC One at 9pm on Monday 15 July; the boxset will be available on BBC iPlayer from the same day
