Informer, episode 6, review: There's too much going on in overcooked finale of BBC drama

Right at the end of Informer (BBC1), the eponymous snout himself, Raza Shar (Nabhaan Rizwan) asks his copper/minder Gabe Waters (Paddy Considine) why his little bro had taken it upon himself to shoot five people dead in a cafe. All Gabe can come up with is: “Why does anyone do anything? Just people”. It’s a line that’s on a par with “Brexit means Brexit”: it sounds momentarily impressive, but in reality doesn’t quite do anyone or anything justice. Sadly, this isn’t all that is wrong with Informer.

The major cause of failure for this series to function is simply put: there’s just too much. Of everything. It’s like the producers decided that there is so much that is fascinating going on in the whole organised-crime-terror-counter-terror matrix that they might as well scoop the whole lot up and melt it into one great big stew.

So, floating around in the BBC’s Tuesday evening minestrone you find Zastava pistols, money-laundering shops, mobile phones (loads of them), fight clubs, chicken shops, the Quran, the Bible, pogoing skins, spies, coppers, council blocks, prayers, teeth-whitening studios (oblique reference there?), art students, gentrification, degradation, the Docklands Light Railway, the Royal Mint and, weirdly, gratuitous references to Volvos.

Noodles of gangsters as well – Albanian people traffickers, Islamic State, West Riding neo-Nazis, dope peddlers. Thus, we end up with too many meandering plot lines and pointless diversions. Gabe spends a good deal of time, for no good reason, resuming a previous undercover persona as a right-wing extremist, “Charlie”, but blows his cover rescuing an Asian pizza delivery driver from a racist beating. Noble, but the whole thing is an irrelevant adventure. This would be too much for MI5 and MI6 to keep track of, let alone some weary viewer.

While I’m on it, there are also too many inexplicable courses of behaviour, such as those of Gabe’s eccentric copper sidekick Holly Morten (Bel Powley). Her whole existence seems devoted to unbelievable acts, culminating in her own murder when she arranges to meet Gabe’s wife in the fatal cafe shooting (the irony laid on a bit too heavy). Holly spends more time trolling her boss than she does going after the hard men of terror. She serves as a human glue-gun for the interminably intermingling plot lines, with intermittent success.

Most of all, there were far, far, far too many characters. Contrast, if you will, Informer with Bodyguard or The Little Drummer Girl, contemporary series that also inhabit broadly similar universes of terror, evil and intrigue. These shows work because they too are concerned with telling intricate, complex stories – but they do so via a few central figures. These we can spend sufficient time with to remember their names, discern their motives and start to care about them (positively or negatively).

But with Informer we never hang around with anyone long to learn to love or hate them. It would work in a soap, because what action there is is easy to grasp – shagging, fighting, boozing. You can’t carry folk for six hours if they’ve no idea who’s who and what’s what.

So it’s a bit of shame, really, as telling the story of an informer is a good idea, the direction was attractive and the performances, Rizwan’s in particular, accomplished. The series has its moments, to be sure. The slo-mo of the cafe shooting through the CCTV; when Riza fears he will have to shoot his idiot friend dead at the behest of the Albs; and when Gabe turns on his racist “mates”.

On the whole, though, you wonder how much better it would have been if the makers (including executive producer Sam Mendes) had, early on, cut out the irrelevant passages, and dismembered their subject before shooting. A bit like those Albanian gangsters would. Or, come to think of it, some “rogue” elements in the Saudi secret police.