It's Mission Improbable - with a chubby chappy as Tom Cruise: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV 

Prey 

Rating:

Amid all the breakneck confusion in Prey (ITV), one brutal crime stood out. It wasn’t the murder — we weren’t even sure of the victim’s identity.

He was just a corpse in a burnt-out car, looking as one callous copper remarked ‘like a charcoal briquet’. And we had no clue who the second body was, the one that plummeted from a tower block and crushed a police car.

It appeared from a garbled phonecall that someone had kidnapped a pregnant woman called Lucy, the daughter of angst-ridden prison officer David (Philip Glenister).

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Amid all the breakneck confusion in Prey (ITV), one brutal crime stood out. It wasn’t the murder — we weren’t even sure of the victim’s identity (Pictured: Philip Glenister and Lisa Millett)

But there wasn’t any speck of sense or logic in his response — instead of calling the police to let the professionals handle it, which would surely be the instinct of a veteran jail warder, Dave turned into a tubby Tom Cruise.

He handcuffed himself to a prisoner, fled, threw a uniformed bobby under a car, fled again, got trapped in a taxi, broke out, kept fleeing, evaded the tracker dogs, leapt into a river, fled once more and was last seen being pursued through a block of flats. That’s not much of a cliffhanger: we can be pretty sure by now that Dave’s plan is to flee.

Only one thing was clear in this pell-mell whirl of pursuit and escape: Glenister can’t sing.

Before all the excitement began, he was belting out the Hosannahs at a choral society rehearsal of Jesus Christ Superstar, with such criminal disregard for melody, pitch and rhythm that crucifixion would probably be less painful.

If Andrew Lloyd Webber decides to press charges for grievous bodily harm to his music, Glenister will have nowhere to run.

Prey last year starred John Simm as a policeman fighting to clear his name. This time, it is Simm’s co-star from the brilliant 2006 series Life On Mars — but apart from the cast, the Manchester setting and a smattering of background banter between detectives, there’s little similarity between the shows.

The best moment came early on, when Rosie Cavaliero’s comfort-eating police inspector was outraged to see a cocky young colleague snapping selfies with the body at a murder scene. ‘I’m not gonna Tweet it!’ he protested.

There weren’t many more lines like that. All the fleeing left no room for wit. But at least Prey proved it could be clever, if only it would slow down for a minute and think.

Suspects 

Rating:

Witty dialogue is glaringly absent from Suspects (C5), the improvisation experiment where the actors make up their lines as they go along. 

The first series last year had a degree of raw energy, probably generated by the terror of standing in front of the cameras without a script. But stars Fay Ripley, Clare-Hope Ashitey and Damien Molony look burned out now.

Writing dialogue is hard work — doing it on the hoof, while trying to act, must be exhausting.

Every line seems to play desperately for time, as characters repeat each other’s banal comments back to each other.

Witty dialogue is glaringly absent from Suspects (C5), the improvisation experiment where the actors make up their lines as they go along

Ashitey ran out of steam altogether at one point, as she tried to summarise the plot so far. ‘You don’t have to finish that sentence,’ Molony told her helpfully.

Never has an arresting officer been so glad to read a suspect his rights as Molony. ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ he begins, stopping every few words to relish the sensation of knowing what he can say next.

At other times, he takes a brave stab at inventing real dialogue, lines that reveal the character’s hidden thoughts. Interrogating a priest on paedophile charges, he told him: ‘You’re a disgrace to your religion!’

That’s a start. There’s an idea buried there — maybe a hint of lapsed Christian faith, or some sense of personal betrayal, perhaps rooted in the detective’s childhood.

A good writer would take that and develop it. Scenes would be rewritten, the backstory could be uncovered. This sort of deep characterisation can’t be made up on the spot . . . though that’s just what the cast of Suspects are expected to do.

It’s time for this show to get a proper script. The actors could still ad lib and invent lines, but their attempt to improvise the whole lot, though bold, just isn’t working.