ITV’s Marcella (Monday) represents another triumphant breakthrough in the portrayal of female cops on television. Of course, thanks to more or less every other crime show around, we already know that women in their forties can be senior police officers. But what Marcella makes even clearer than, say, Vera or No Offence is that so can women in their forties who are entirely unsuited to being senior police officers.
For a start, the eponymous heroine suffers from regular mental collapses during which she often turns violent before handily forgetting — and forgiving herself for — anything bad she may have done. She also seems to specialise in cases where she hasa deep personal involvement that might cause a lesser woman to worry about a conflict of interests.
In this new series, for example, the body of a murdered nine-year-old was discovered behind the wall of a London flat. Despite the corpse being in an advanced state of decay, Marcella (Anna Friel, acting her socks off throughout — and in one scene her pants) immediately recognised the victim as her son Edward’s friend Leo, who’d disappeared in 2014.
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