Bancroft, review: Baroque, bonkers and hilariously off the wall

If you like bonkers, you’ll love Bancroft. Built around a tornado-strength performance by Sarah Parish as a sort of Wicked Witch of regional policing, series one back-flipped from silly to hysterical and was never less than compelling. The second series, it is a pleasure to report, is even more barking.

Two loose ends are immediately tied off by writer Kate Brooke as we reconnect with Parish’s Detective Chief Inspector Elizabeth Bancroft (Lady Macbeth meets Thanos from the Marvel movies, squeezed into an ITV procedural). Bancroft has, we discover, finished what she started by bumping off her nemesis, DS Katherine Stevens (Faye Marsay).

Stevens was last seen slipping into a coma after being shot by Bancroft, following her rumbling of her superior’s involvement in a cold-case murder. Her prognosis has since taken a distinct turn for the worse. A mysterious figure is depicted creeping up to her hospital bedside and snuffing out the pesky crusading copper. Bancroft’s back all right.

There is also a brief update regarding the anti-heroine’s fraught relationship with her son Joe (Adam Long). They remain estranged in the wake of Joe working out that his mum has murdered and manipulated her way to a promotion to DCI. He’s moved on – into the arms of glamorous junior doctor fiance Annabel. She is portrayed by Charlotte Hope, previously witnessed smirking her way to a sticky end as Myranda, sadistic lover of Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones.

Hope’s CV serves as a wink towards her new character. Annabel, it becomes incrementally clear, is just as much a piece of work as Bancroft herself. She has poor Joe wrapped around her finger. And she is entirely aware how much it pains Bancroft to see her son under the spell of another woman. This is loudly enunciated in a scene in which the lovers canoodle in a hotel swimming pool. As the couple tryst and shout, Annabel gazes triumphantly into the shadows where she knows Joe’s mother is watching. As I say, bonkers with brass bells on.

As coincidence would have it, Annabel is a potential suspect in the brutal slaying of her father and stepmother. So, too, is Joe, to his mum’s horror. But a double-murder is just one of several spinning plates to which Bancroft must attend in a table-setting first episode brimming with exposition (Bancroft runs across three consecutive nights). From her new perch at the top of the force, she is busy overseeing the merger of two police divisions in the fictional north of England city where the show is set. This has given her the means to marginalise her old nemesis, Superintendent Cliff Walker (Adrian Edmondson), the only cop (still living) who sees her for the monster she is.

Meanwhile, the drug-dealer whose tacit support has brought her to her present prominence (Ryan McKen) has a problem of his own: his vengeful mother is back and selling dodgy product on the street (three victims and counting). A manic mum-day looms for Bancroft, too, with Francesca Annis set to swoop in as the villainess’s own matriarchal shadow from the past, Carol.

Baroque and hilariously off the wall, Bancroft gets 2020 started with a bang. It isn’t for everyone. Those who enjoy plausibility, coherent plotting and dialogue vaguely related to the way people speak in the real world may struggle to stay the course. But if you’re up for champagne-fountain-quantities of gothic camp disguised, rather thinly, as an ITV police drama, it is thoroughly recommended.