Dial mum for murder

Last Night's TV The Reckoning / ITV1 Twenty Twelve / BBC4

Goodness knows what Fyodor Dostoevsky would have made of it hadhe been watching ITV1 last night, but there were clear echoes of hisepic novel Crime and Punishment in The Reckoning, with nice Scottishex-nurse Sally Wilson (Ashley Jensen) weighing up the moralimplications of committing murder, given that her intended victimwas himself a killer who had mutilated a young prostitute andincidentally lived in Gerrards Cross. What Gerrards Cross had doneto deserve him, I don't know. Maybe the writer, Chris Lang, once gota parking ticket there.

Lang's script imbued his own decidedly improbable plot with aboutas much plausibility as it could reasonably carry, and some decentperformances, in particular by Jensen, better known to most of usfor playing comedy, did the rest, turning what could have been anexercise in unadulterated daftness into a pretty gripping thriller.It concludes this evening, and happily the obligatory "Next Time"trailer before the closing credits didn't undermine the suspense,as, maddeningly, it so often does.

The story began with a fatal stabbing, carried out by a troubledyoung woman who was later killed in a hit-and-run. You can generallyrely on the corpses piling up in ITV two-parters and so it was here,with another character strangled by the fiendish fellow fromGerrards Cross. What links these deaths appears to be a stranger'swill in which bequests of 5m are offered on condition that aparticular murder is committed. That's what happened to Sally, whoalmost did what the rest of us would do on being asked to bump off achap from Gerrards Cross for five million quid - namely walk veryquickly in the opposite direction, ideally towards a police station.

But she didn't. Conveniently for the plot, Sally has a cancer-stricken teenage daughter, whose survival depends on expensivetreatment in America. She also has a partner, Mark (Max Beesley), anex-policeman who nudged her towards accepting the contract, at leastif they could show that the intended victim, Richard Bury, wasdastardly enough to deserve a bullet in the chops. Even moreconveniently, Sally now works in the credit-checking department of abank, and so was able to see from Bury's incomings and outgoingsthat he was a regular user of prostitutes. Then she took her life inher hands and went to Gerrards Cross after dark, where she loiteredoutside Bury's handsome house, and watched a happy family scene thatwas nicely illuminated both for Sally's benefit and ours, Buryhaving obligingly followed the first rule of television drama andneglected to draw the curtains.

That's more or less it so far, but for another few fishy detailsthat may or may not be red herrings. It could be that the dead manwith the strange will has a grudge against her, since we learnt thatSally had been cleared of negligence charges at the hospital whereshe once worked. This useful titbit of information came when herpartner, Mark, looked up her story on the internet, which showedeither that he doesn't know her very well, or that there's more tohim than meets the eye, or that Lang couldn't think of any betterway to give us Sally's backstory, internet search engines beingalmost as dramatically useful as open curtains. Most likely, it's acombination of all three. Whatever, I hope the story ends morehappily for Sally than it did for Raskolnikov in Crime andPunishment.

As for last night's other Sally (Olivia Colman), personalassistant to Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), head of deliverance atthe Olympic Deliverance Commission in the always amusing andsporadically very funny Twenty Twelve, I yearned for the happyending that she herself seemed to yearn for, a meaningful clinchwith her boss. Alas, the final episode didn't yield the romanticencounter it had promised, despite Sally continuing to show muchmore devotion to Ian than he got at home from his needy, nagging,pixellated wife.

It's hard to think of a spoof documentary that has been morefortuitously timed than Twenty Twelve. The first episode poked funat the Olympic countdown clock, and within less than a day the realclock had malfunctioned. Since then, there's been no end of argy-bargy concerning the future use of the Olympic stadium, with thedecision to hand it to West Ham United robustly challenged byTottenham Hotspur and Leyton Orient. Oh, and marathon man DavidBedford has resigned, citing general ineptitude. So it has takenonly a very small leap of the imagination into the fictional worldof the ODC, whose head of sustainability (Amelia Bullmore) was lastnight confronted by a man from the London Wildlife Stag BeetleOutreach Project, worried that clearing an area of tree stumps wouldwreak devastation among his beloved beetles.

Similarly outraged was Tony Ward (Tim McInnerny), a volatile film-maker aghast at the deployment of Greenwich Park for the equestrianevents, and the probable daily invasion of "20,000 pubescent girlsfrom second-rate public schools in Surrey with dreadful aspirationalmothers". To demonstrate his opposition, Ward had a large pile ofhorse manure dumped outside the ODC offices, which Fletcher agreedto deal with to "keep it from Seb".

I don't think that's another example of art and life colliding,but it easily could be. Indeed, Ward and Roberts finally came faceto face in the Today programme studio, where they were asked asuccinct question by James Naughtie, just about the only trulyunlikely turn of events in the entire half-hour.

b.viner@independent.co.uk