The Pope Dunnit

I fancied a bit of detective tosh last night, to chase off the hangover wrought by champagne cocktails and several glasses of wine at lunch, so settled down to watch Waking The Dead because it's got She Queen, the best thing about Brookie, and Shoestring Trevor Eve in it as a police psychologist and a super Met Chief Inspector type who open up unsolved murder cases, wear white coats, frown at dusty corpses and write on plate glass windows with magic markers. They have a team of youthful underlings who provide something pretty to look at and do all the running around. They also have Tara Fitzgerald as the slightly weird but sexy pathologist. Tara wears a white coat all the time and isn't mean to a winsome Victorian child once; neither does she get her cornet out and treat everybody to a soulful rendition of the Concerto de Aranjuez while shutting down a pit and giving Pete Postlethwaite a heart attack. Which is nice.

So, the plot goes something like this. We get a flashback - last night's was to the 1990s, when hair was big and bankers had secret lovenests behind the filing cabinets. Somebody shoots a shagging couple. Fully clothed. You didn't get naked sex on TV until at least 1997. Fifteen years later, builders in the process of turning the bank into a trendy wine bar hit a ceiling and out drop two skeletons, still at it by the look of things. Cut to Shoestring and She Queen swapping witticisms over coffee while the underlings smirk at each other. Tara pokes the shagging skeletons with a biro and deduces that they were up to No Good. Shoestring links it all to Black Wednesday, and the underlings laugh as She Queen cries: "Norman Lamont! Young 'uns these days ..." Peter Capaldi appears from nowhere as a reformed fraudster who now lectures bankers on what to do with their shit, which is a Freudian analogy for money. Anyway, Peter twinkles at She Queen and uses lots of psychobabble to bamboozle her, but she's a proper psychologist so she only pretends to be bamboozled. At least, I hope so.

A blonde pops up from nowhere, says she's a journalist writing about a missing lady banker who was married to a cocaine dealer from Dublin. DNA shows that yes, it is the lady banker and her lover, and Tara proves, using the young ones as giggling props, that they were killed in flagrante with one bullet. Wow. The youngsters stop giggling and look meaningfully at each other until She Queen turns the hose on them. Not really.

There are a couple of men in suits who look worried, and then after one goes off, the other, slightly more important one picks up his mobile phone and starts speaking in Latin. Something like: "Gettus riddus of that blokeus wot sold us the gearus". Shoestring waves pictures of Roberto Calvi and starts muttering about Opus Dei-led conspiracy theories. I begin to suspect the hand of Ian Paisley in the writing of this script, and the young 'uns smirk. The Gards say they've got better things to do than go around arresting shifty chaps just because some English bastard says they should, so Shoestring has to shifty coke dealer chappie around the disused warehouse himself. Coke dealer falls off a high place despite Shoestring's frantic attempts to save him. Is there any point in watching the conclusion? Or should I just tune in to see Shoestring and She Queen try to arrest the Pope, and fail. So they go for Ruth Kelly instead...