Utterly bog-standard: BBC2’s The Turkish Detective reviewed

A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama. But in fact, if you strip away The Turkish Detective’s minarets and bazaars (not hard given that they supply somewhat perfunctory local colour), what remains is, according to taste, either reassuringly familiar or utterly bog-standard.

The series began with Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai) leaving his job at the Metropolitan Police to take up fish-out-of-water duties in the city of his birth. Waiting for him at Istanbul airport was what at first seemed like a straightforward comedy foreigner, much given to muttering the words ‘very good, very good’ and driving like a maniac while smoking a lot. This, however, turned out to be the programme’s eponymous hero, DI Cetin Ikmen (Haluk Bilginer) who, in the traditional manner of grizzled TV cops, soon established himself as gruff but kindly, world-weary yet somehow strangely idealistic.

In this – and, indeed, facially too – Ikmen bears a more than passing resemblance to Julien Baptiste, the French detective who starred in two BBC1 series a few years ago. Nonetheless, his real role model appears to be Columbo. Immaculately shabby of dress and unfailingly vulpine in his wiliness, Ikmen has a style of interrogation that lurches suddenly from performative politeness to the posing of a killer question. (At one point, the phrase, ‘Just one more thing’ even featured in his subtitles.)

The rest of the programme isn’t overly concerned with originality either. As a Brit so uptight that he tries to arrest Ikmen’s more ‘colourful’ friends merely for breaking the law, Suleyman recalls pretty much every lead detective in Death in Paradise. The other members of the team are a computer nerd who wears specs and a kickass female dreamboat. All of them are – of course – overseen by a boss who is overly concerned with not allowing them to upset any important people: something that Ikmen – of course – rather specialises in.

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Meanwhile, the discovery of a body this week was signalled by a waitress dropping her tray, and was immediately followed by each of the cops getting out of their cars at the crime scene and slamming their respective doors purposefully behind them. A key plot-point revolved around the killer being left-handed.

Perhaps sensing that this was all a touch workmanlike, the second episode decided to up the ante by having a previously mild-mannered minor character go bonkers – and, with that, going fairly bonkers itself. After what had been essentially a domestic drama, the climax was reached with an incel ranting about ‘feminazis’ and threatening to blow himself up – along with lecture hall full of teenage girls.

The Turkish Detective isn’t a complete write-off. The pace is winningly brisk, Ikmen has undeniable charisma and, while the main crime was solved in the customary two-episodes style, the programme has set up a couple of decent wider arcs for the remaining six. Even so, anybody seeking a programme  that’s inspired rather than, at best, mostly quite efficient, should look elsewhere.

The BBC’s director of comedy Jon Petrie recently made a welcome speech calling for more sitcoms full of funny jokes. On the face of it, this might sound like an odd thing to have to say – but much of the comedy of the past few years has come with the ominous word ‘drama’ attached. Such shows, Petrie suggested, have had their day: instead of fundamentally sombre explorations of troubling personal experience, it’s time we had some laughs.

In that context, Spent feels like a curious and confused kind of halfway house. Still too self-involved and still too content to let several minutes pass without any gags, it does at least throw in the occasional burst of quite broad humour – if often with the sense it’s suddenly remembered that that’s something it should be doing.

Written by and starring actress and comedian Michelle de Swarte, the series draws on her life as a former model, although at the start of the first episode her character, Mia, didn’t realise just how former she was.

In the opening scene, we saw her in New York being warned by her accountant that she could no longer afford to spend, say, $14,000 on crystals. (‘You’re making it sound bad because you’re adding it all together,’ protested Mia in one of the episode’s actual jokes.) Her solution was to declare herself bankrupt in the States and return to her native London to look for work, eventually finding it only as a dogsitter for a middle-class woman who confirmed Mia’s theory that ‘Posh people are mad, innit’.

As the two of them jousted, the reason for the programme’s confusion became ever clearer. Is this meant to be a sitcom-style satire of Mia’s feelings of entitlement or a comedy-drama-style celebration of her indestructible confidence in the face of an unjust world? The answer is a firm and ultimately unsatisfying ‘it doesn’t know’.