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As bumpy as a bike ride over Amsterdam’s cobbles

VAN DER VALK SUNDAY, ITV

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I’m old enough to remember the cheery da-da-da, da-da-da theme tune to the original Van Der Valk which, back in September 1973, became an unlikely No 1, confusingly entitled Eye Level, with the theme from Crown Court on the Bside. However, the show itself, with dashing Barry Foster as hard-bittenyet-instinctively-gifted detective Piet VDV (sound familiar? Yup, that’s every TV detective, ever) plying his trade in sexy, occasionally even redlit, Amsterdam, was both off-limits and way past my bedtime.

I also missed the April 2020 reboot starring the estimable Marc Warren because I was too busy gorging on Tiger King on Netflix and trying to fathom Zoom. Nonetheless, sufficient

The plot was so clever-clogs and complex, it made me feel exhausted

people enjoyed the British cast pretending to be Dutch natives who talk like Brits for us to be given three more feature-length episodes: a sweetly retro concept given that actual Danes were allowed to star in Netflix’s recent Borgen update.

Mind you, Van Der Valk is arguably still airing past my personal watershed – within the first few seconds we had the obligatory dead female victim, ‘crucified’ scarecrow-style on a bleak wind farm, because rare is the contemporary cop show that spares us dead-girls-in-close-up. However, while the detective tropes were as thick on the ground as pools of dried

■ Good Grief (Monday, Ch4) followed the Reverend Richard Coles on his journey after the death of his husband David in

2019. ‘Being surrounded by death in my profession, I thought I’d know how to do this. I didn’t,’ he says.

Via ‘laughter yoga’, ‘surf therapy’ and boxing, Coles eventually demonstrated his natural talents as both musician (he was one half of 80s pop group The Communards) and Minister while sailing on a ‘grief cruise’. And though many of the strategies will be of practical help for those coping with loss, it was Coles’s openness in confronting his pain that was most powerfully affecting. Hankies are required if you watch on catch-up. blood, there was still plenty of fun to be had. Marc Warren’s gloomy, deadpan brooding is always watchable, even though the plot was so cleverclogs and complex (a starring primetime ITV role for 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza? Bring it on!) that keeping on top of it made me feel as exhausted as the lad who saw the crack in the dyke and wondered how to save the country from being flooded in the classic Dutch story.

On the other hand, it was nice to be reacquainted with the word ‘polder’. I’ve not heard it since I did a school project on land reclamation (a polder is a reclaimed stretch of land). Which was pretty much the thrust of the plot – a spate of Spinoza-inspired murders ensued after an alternative community were forced to move to a polder after losing a legal case against unscrupulous property developers (when are property types in TV dramas ever scrupulous, frankly?).

It all ended up with an angry crusty wearing a suicide belt and threatening to blow up The Hague’s equivalent of the London Eye, while Vdv’s righthand woman Lucienne deployed her rusty old bomb-squad skills, snipping at wires as helicopters circled, snipers cocked rifles and the clock ticked

down. It was as if we’d worm-holed our way into an old episode of 24.

The journey towards the celebratory team beers (replete with a rehomed ex-sniffer dog – cute!) may have been as bumpy as a bicycle ride over Amsterdam’s cobbles while, barge-style, the dialogue rocked-androlled from the frankly unfathomable (‘You don’t know me.’ ‘No, but I know me. And that helps...’) to comedy-banter during autopsies.

But, dead-girls-in-close-up aside, this isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. It’s August, after all. Plus, Amsterdam looked lovely. However, even though the reboot barely features that memorable 1970s tune, it has ear-wormed its way into my head. At this rate I’ll be drying my hair by candlelight in front of the three-bar fire, dreaming of a remake of The Virginian, just as I was back in 1973.

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2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

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