ITV's Unforgotten, TV review: Stygian thriller takes its time to get going – and that’s if you can follow it

The opening credits of Unforgotten had a quality of impending doom. This wasn’t because of the creepy music and scarlet-tinged images, near Scandinavian in their trendy Stygian gloom. We’re all used to those nowadays. It was really because of the frightening roster of talent that had been assembled for this crime drama: Nicola Walker, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Trevor Eve, Tom Courtenay, Bernard Hill, Gemma Jones, Cherie Lunghi and Hannah Gordon, to name some, well, unforgotten and unforgettable actors. I fretted, you see, that this roll call presaged the arrival of a plump televisual turkey – an omen that, not for the first time, producers had decided to blow the budget on the “names” rather than, say, the script. This is ITV, after all.

And, as the characters were spasmodically introduced, that did seem to be so, notwithstanding Andy Wilson’s stylish direction. One minute we found ourselves in a pensioners’ bungalow in Ely, with the onset of Alzheimer’s adding to the despondency. Next we were with a talented-but-deprived schoolboy in Shepherd’s Bush, plus plucky teacher. Then we’re confronted with Bernard Hill’s singing psycho-vicar. Ever since his landmark performance as Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff, Hill has, rightly, cornered the market for playing nutters. Borderline nutters, outright nutters, violent nutters, repressed nutters – nobody does it better. And here we have a quite exquisite confection, the probable-borderline-nutter who also happens to be a corrupt vicar. Next we find ourselves sipping fizz in the House of Lords, with a peer on the make. Most of the time, though, we were in the basement of 27 Arlingham Place, Willesden, London, staring at a pile of bones (c1977), with coppers wandering in chemical suits speaking that peculiar language of forensic-ese that we have become perhaps all too familiar with.

It was, in other words, just a little tricky to keep hold of all these threads, slowly weaving their way to become the warp and weft of a gripping mystery – but that they did, eventually, do, thanks to a 1976 Letts diary. Unforgotten, in other words, resolved itself by the close of its first episode into a promising whodunnit. It just took a bit too long to own up to the fact.