The Tower (ITV1) returned for a second series but since its debut run, seemed to have mislaid all its main selling points. When it arrived in 2021, this police procedural was characterised by the orange anorak worn by lead detective Sarah Collins (Gemma Whelan), a Line of Duty-alike police malfeasance plot and victims plummeting to their deaths from a tower block rooftop, hence the title.
This four-part follow-up jettisoned the lot. Nobody fell from a high-rise. There was no sign of police corruption. The protagonist had even swapped her coral coat for a less arresting (pardon the pun) shade of green. In the crowded crime genre, ditching your distinguishing features is foolhardy. Call 999, originality has gone missing.
Bearing her box of belongings and perma-furrowed brow, DS Collins had transferred from the Directorate of Special Investigations to Homicide Command. While her rude rent-a-bloke colleagues investigated a chicken-shop shooting, newbie Collins was fobbed off with a cold case: a teenage girl’s disappearance 25 years ago, on the day of Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral. Odds of these cases being connected? High, if watching these shows has taught me anything.
Whelan convinced as our hangdog heroine. Her loneliness was reinforced by several scenes of her going home to a ready meal for one with a side salad of heavy sighing. Sharif was Bafta-nominated for her role as idealistic PC Lizzie Adama (Tahirah Sharif) and shone again. Brian McCardie has become one of TV’s go-to villains – from Line of Duty’s gang boss to the prison top dog in Time. He delivered another memorably chilling turn as a sex offender whose maxim of “look, don’t touch” did nothing to diminish his flesh-crawling creepiness.
The Tower is stripped across the week and might yet catch alight. This opener had fixed its mumbly dialogue problem, but plodded along with all the urgency of a doughnut-scoffing copper who’s counting the days until retirement. It didn’t help that the crimes happened off-camera. Presumably we’ll see them in flashback later. Will viewers stay that long?