Sean Harris, already typecast as modern British quality drama’s resident feral loon, is in uniform here as a Yorkshire copper who acts like a goon working for some South American junta – but is also used by shadowy powers to brainwash Garfield into becoming a tool to shut down a monster who’s gone too far.
The starry line-up (Warren Clarke, Eddie Marsan, David Morrissey, Peter Mullan) of characters (coppers, senior journo, priest) with little to do here plants seeds for later in the saga. Garfield isn’t bad but keeps being upstaged by characters whose deaths serve to stiffen his resolve to do something right: investigative reporter Barry Gannon (Anthony Flanagan), who is a jittery paranoid (talking about Yorkshire Death Squads) but canny enough to get some right answers, and Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), enigmatic mother of one of the missing kids who has an affair with Garfield and projects a cross between traumatised kitchen sink martyr and doomed femme fatale (Hall, as is becoming customary, does another unique, haunting performance unlike anything she’s done before). The smarmy, self-hating wideboy hero, who suffers greatly for his initial callowness as he loses loved ones and is repeatedly beaten up by the police, is practically a caricature of the sort of scumbag protagonist found in James Ellroyish noir novels and, as in the films of Ellroy’s stories, a hard sell in the adaptation.
The whole notion of the fairly irredeemable flawed hero, ambitious journo Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), going after a top dog who is both tycoon and sex killer seems to be a transplant from Cutter’s Way, which (as novel and film) was more interestingly plotted.
The crooked politics – which include burning out an entire gypsy camp ‘like Vietnam or something’, an incident shown impressively by a visit to a literally blasted heath aftermath – ring true for 1974, but the psychopathology is post-Thomas Harris, Se7enish stuff. It remains to be seen how this will affect the trilogy when it’s considered as a whole, but this straightish adaptation by Tony Grisoni of the first of the books, directed in hallucinatory style by Julian Jarrold, had period atmos and grim-oop-North murk to spare but stumbles over the slightly reductive revelation (spoiler!) that property developing bastard John Dawson (Sean Bean) who is the Mr Big with crooked fingers in every pie and payoffs in every police pocket is also the paedophile torturing killer who abducts little girls and sews swan-wings on their backs (!) when he’s done with them.
#Diogenes trilogy series
David Peace’s Yorshire noir quartet of date-titled novels has come to television shorn of its second part (1977) – evidently a budget-conscious decision which fits in sadly with Channel 4’s tendency to select outstanding literary series (Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour) for adaptation and then give them the sort of short shrift practically guaranteed to tick off devotees of the books and mystify newcomers.
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