Down on the South Coast, it is the end of a perfect summer. Every evening, the lowering sun turns the Dorset cliffs the colour of molten honey, before sinking behind a landscape of lush fields and church spires.
Every morning the sun ripens and rises again, beating down upon a small seaside town with a sparkling shoreline — and a dark secret.
For in the dead of a hot summer night, for reasons yet unknown, 11-year-old Danny Latimer was murdered and found at the foot of the cliffs.
Against the jolly backdrop of bucket ’n’ spade gift shops and ice-cream sellers, the horror of his death seems even more shocking.
As his parents grieve, the detectives scout for clues and the community turns in on itself, the question everyone is asking is: who is the killer in Broadchurch?
In the hit drama from ITV, Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller is played with quiet brilliance by the actress Olivia Colman.
Ellie is the simpatico local cop with insider knowledge, but she has been passed over for promotion by brash newcomer Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant).
However, the traditional cop-on-cop conflict has been turned on its head.
While Tennant, the former Doctor Who, is clearly the big marquee name hired to bring in the crowds, he is frequently outshone by Colman.
Indeed, there is barely a scene between the two of them that she does not steal.
With her no-nonsense anoraks and cross-body bags, Ellie is tough yet empathetic, kindly, irritable and so real that you feel you know her.
Whether snatching lunch with her family, dishing out holiday presents to her colleagues or confronting her abrasive boss, Colman is extraordinary at being ordinary — perhaps the hardest thing for an actress to achieve.
In the past, she has done comedy and drama: she is one of those rare actresses who can switch between the two while being tremendous in both.
She has one of those faces that is instantly familiar to TV viewers, but her ability to disappear into a role and cast makes it hard to pin down her work.
She has appeared in, among others, Peep Show and Green Wing. The 39-year-old actress also won a new fanbase as the vicar’s wife in the comedy drama Rev and — surely this is everyone’s favourite — as Hugh Bonneville’s love-struck PA in the hit BBC comedy Twenty Twelve.
Despite winning a host of movie awards for Tyrannosaur and critical acclaim for her role as Carol Thatcher, complete with a blonde wig, in The Iron Lady, her role in Broadchurch is being seen as her big breakthrough.
Some believe it might do for Olivia Colman what playing a similar type of detective in Prime Suspect did for Helen Mirren — pave the way for a Hollywood career.
Modest Olivia would probably beg to differ. She believes that part of her success as an actress is her lack of vanity: she doesn’t mind looking a frump on stage or screen.
Certainly, as windswept Ellie in a rubber mac searches for bloodstains on boats in the harbour or tries to console a bereaved mother at the end of a long police shift, she looks as glam as a wet haddock. And that is the way she likes it.
That’s not to say co-star Tennant is disappointing as the troubled Hardy in Broadchurch.
With all the social skills of a dropped anvil, he is a cop with a past; a man tormented by a similar murder case he failed to solve.
He also has an unspecified illness, where he blacks out and bangs his head if he runs out of pills.
Still, whatever he is going through, audiences wait quietly for the return of Ellie onscreen.
For in Broadchurch, it is Colman’s character that provides the emotional still centre; she is the voice of reason in a community racked by grief and suspicion.
She is the person everyone turns to — even as she becomes suspicious herself.
‘I hate what I am becoming,’ she said to her boss Hardy this week.
‘A good detective?’ he wondered. Hardened,’ she replied.
Four episodes into ITV’s gripping new drama and viewers are still no nearer the truth. Like Cluedo addicts, we nurture pet suspicions as we pore over the evidence.
Was it the insomniac vicar in the graveyard with a hammer? Was it the newsagent in the scout hut with a rolled-up copy of Tit-bits? Was it the dad? The dog? The scary lady in the caravan? Everyone is desperate to find out.
In the meantime, with more than seven million tuning in every Monday evening to see what happens next, Broadchurch has been a big hit with viewers. It is not hard to see why.
The gripping, slow-burn series, written by Chris Chibnall (who cut his teeth on Doctor Who, Torchwood and Law & Order UK), examines what happens to a small, tight-knit community when the murder of a child takes place in its midst.
Rather than just a straight- forward police procedural drama, Broadchurch also focuses on the shattered and bereaved family.
Once the TV appeals have been made, the cameras are turned off and the police go home, what happens behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of the bereft home?
For once, we see how the parents Mark (Andrew Buchan) and Beth (Jodie Whittaker) try to bear the unbearable.
Whittaker, in particular, is wrenchingly effective. Her pale, haunted face speaks of a mother’s pain that will never end, while her sprint along the beach towards the body of her dead son was harrowing.
She is also secretly pregnant — should we assume her husband is the father?
An emotional thriller such as this deserves a theatrical backdrop and, in this, Broadchurch dazzles.
Filmed in and around West Bay in Dorset last year, the stunning Jurassic Coast is shown at its best.
The tourist office is reporting a huge swell of interest, while local businesses advertise their premises ‘as seen in Broadchurch’ as they prepare for a bumper summer.
This is in marked contrast to their onscreen counterparts, who complain they do not want their town to be a ‘byword for murder’.
Chibnall — who insisted none of the actors knew who the killer was during filming — lived in the area for almost ten years and was always aware of its dramatic potential.
In the eight-part series, the beach, sea and cliffs are key elements in the story.
Yet what makes Broadchurch stand out from the usual TV cop dramas is the odd, unsettling atmosphere it creates and the fine acting that propels it along.
Olivia Colman is excellent at acting as a conduit for the strangeness, tensions and complex relationships that lie just under the surface of a small town.
In these neat streets, behind the doors of ordinary houses like hers, Ellie Miller must help unmask a killer who is hiding in plain sight. The question is — who?
Source:dailymail.co.uk – Is Broadchurch star Olivia Colman the new Helen Mirren?
