Red Riding

IT’S AN overused phrase but, trust me, tonight’s Red Riding really is unlike anything you’ve seen on TV.

It’s a feature-length film (two hours with ads) yet it’s only the first of a trilogy.

Technically, it’s a crime drama, loosely based around the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 70s. But it’s based on the celebrated books by David Peace – author of The Damned United, out as a film later this month – and… well, let’s just say they’re different.

Put it this way: torture, ­violence and unexpected, ­almost blackly comic death is rife. Some of the murders are based on fact but it bleeds into fiction, with one of the dead girls found with a swan’s wing sown on her back.

The look is relentlessly grim – every shot is smoky and dark, newspaper offices and working men’s clubs are glimpsed through a Marlboro fog – yet the feel is impressionistic, almost magical.

It’s strewn with hard-bitten lines – at a press conference where a mother is making a sobbing plea for the return of her daughter, a hack casually asks a colleague how he thinks the father did it. Yet it shimmers with the otherworldly strangeness of a David Lynch film – more than one character appears to give a semi-coherent warning about bad tidings to come.

There are no real endings, and nothing in the way of feel-good resolution. The characters in this film overlap into the next two but they aren’t really the same story.

Like I said, you haven’t seen anything like Red Riding. Heartbeat it ain’t.

This opening story centres around Eddie (the excellent Andrew Garfield, last seen in the equally excellent Boy A), a journalist tasked to investigate a breaking story of ­missing girls. It isn’t long ­before he finds himself caught in a downward spiral of ­corrupt newspapermen, corrupt officers, and corrupt officials. Everyone in Red Riding is corrupt – the few who aren’t are the ­really dodgy ones.

Which brings us to an ­obvious question: is it any good? Yes, it’s quite brilliant. It won’t ­appeal to everyone, but it’s the most wildly ambitious piece of TV since Dennis Potter in his heyday.

But what’s really ­remarkable is how the parts work together – ­everything should jar but nothing does. Even the sex scenes, ­notably ­between Garfield’s journalist and ­Rebecca Hall’s grieving mother, are done with a ­tenderness seemingly at odds with Red Riding’s ­otherwise brutal nihilism.

They may be the stand-out actors tonight, but the overall cast is similarly stunning – take your pick from Sean Bean, David Morrissey and Maxine Peake, to name a few.

Channel 4 should take all the plaudits for doing something so confident and bold. It’s not easy viewing, but it won’t be forgotten by those who can take it.