It’s Van Der Naff... and that theme tune’s been ruined

Van Der Valk

ITV, Sunday ☆★★★★

Tom Daley: Illegal To Be Me

BBC1, Wednesday ☆☆☆☆★

Although considerably underwhelmed with the first series of the Van Der Valk reboot, I thought I’d give the second series a try, because I’m generous that way. I can’t help it. It’s just my nature. Also, I do remember the original Barry Foster series from the 1970s, because I’m ancient in that way – it played on Wednesday nights, I think – which I also can’t help.

It’s to do with the year I was born. I have always retained a fondness for this Dutch detective, as well as the chart-topping theme tune, Eye Level by the Simon Park Orchestra (with a B-side of the Crown Court music!), which, alas, is so diluted here it might as well have not been included. It does make you wonder: what is the point? But then so much of this does make you wonder that.

To be fair, Van Der Valk suffers from the affliction of most home-grown Sunday night detective series in that the plots are always so ploddingly convoluted and naff.

It’s as if they’ve all been made in a factory with no quality control. Gregg Wallace would get excited about them – ‘This factory makes 896 plots an hour!’ – but he is easily pleased. It’s lovely to see Roger Allam going about with a baguette under his arm (Murder In Provence), and it’s also good to see Jason Watkins in anything (McDonald & Dodds) but, please God, save me from yet another murdered professor with rivalrous colleagues who could have all bashed him around the head with the statuette from his desk. Or similar. Or yet more dead women, as we have here.

I could tell this had been written by a man (Chris Murray), as it has, within the opening minutes, a mutilated woman crucified on a wind farm, followed by a woman drowned in a fish tank and then thrown into one of Amsterdam’s canals.

Enter our hero, Commissaris Piet Van Der Valk, played by Marc Warren, who I have nothing against personally. On the contrary, he’s the dead spit (isn’t he?) of Malcolm McDowell, which is a good thing, but are we really to believe he is so irresistibly sexy that three women – three! – would throw themselves at him while he was brooding alone in a bar? One becomes his new girlfriend, but as we learn nothing about her, you wonder again: what is the point?

This ploddingly convoluted plot involved environmental campaigners fighting corporate greed, or something like that, and a serial killer who leaves cryptic clues inspired by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Thankfully, this Van Der Valk has incredible powers of deduction and is always right, which is quite the gift. Meanwhile, he works with a tip-top team of cliches – the Aspergerish cop, the one who is a dolt, the woman who is competent but dull. As for the killer, and as is usually the case, it’s someone who didn’t really feature until two minutes before the end. It was all very Van Der Silly, as well as Van Der Quite Boring.

Plus, so much was plain baffling. Why does everyone have such bad hair? Why do the top team of cliches meet in a cafe rather than back at the police station? Isn’t it a faff always taking all the paperwork there? Why do the police speak in London accents while the suspects are always Dutch? Has it been suggested that Van Der Valk might attend charm school?

At a bare minimum, shouldn’t someone pull him aside and say: ‘Piet, you’re meant to interview suspects, not insinuate in front of them. Buck up, lad!’ And so on. Also, please bring back the full-blooded theme tune. Why can’t they do that, at least?

At the outset of Tom Daley: Illegal To Be Me the gold medal-winning Olympic diver said this: ‘I’m an athlete and I’m gay. It hasn’t always been easy for me to say that. In London 2012, out of 11,000 athletes only 23 were openly gay. There were clearly more athletes who were closeted, and I was one of them. Back then I was at my most scared of being outed.’ We cut to footage of Daley as a young diver, and it was so affecting. Who knew, back then, that he was carrying not only the weight of Britain’s expectations, but also the weight of centuries of hate and persecution?

This programme came with an objective: he wants the Commonwealth Games to take a stand. In half the countries that participate being gay is illegal, and in some it can even lead to the death sentence. He travelled to Pakistan and Jamaica. He spoke to gay sports people, often with their identities concealed, who told of their horrifying experiences.

His idea was that any Commonwealth country where homosexuality is criminalised should be banned from hosting the games, but he was disabused of that. Those countries, he was told, would blame the gay community, making their situation worse.

As he discovered, it’s a complex issue, with roots that go back to colonialisation and even to slavery. His sincerity was plain, as was his pain – his own grandparents called him ‘disgusting’ – but it concluded hopefully, with his appearance at this year’s opening ceremony, carrying the Pride flag along with six other activists and athletes, including some from Pakistan and Jamaica. It’s not much but it’s a start.