What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a certain age pottering about at home when he’s suddenly and shockingly murdered by asphyxiation. You then roll the opening credits, forget about the dead guy and introduce the main character, who’s asked to take part in some sort of mission — and agonises about whether to accept or to leave the whole series somewhat stranded. At least, this is exactly what happened in both of this week’s big new Sunday-night dramas: BBC1’s Baptiste and Channel 4’s Traitors.
In Baptiste, the pre-credits murder was of an apparently harmless shell-collector in Deal — and the main character is, of course, Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo), the ageing French detective whose endless Gallic wisdom proved so popular in The Missing that he’s now been given his own series. When we met Baptiste on Sunday, he’d recently retired to Amsterdam to spend more time delivering his little aphorisms with his family.
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