DCI Banks: Aftermath, ITV1

”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green light) that it’s hard not to contemplate the notion that there’s some kind of grim finishing school that all blossoming sadistic bastards are obliged to attend before getting their licence to kill.

But while Morse would have snorted dismissively at the machete-inflicted carnage and suggested to Lewis that it was time for a pint, DCI Banks - taking onboard the full horror of the four plastic-wrapped bodies lying before him - almost vomits. And thus we get our first insight into a character ITV presumably hopes will be their next flagship detective.

So far, so predictable, even if knowingly so (Bank’s Detective Sergeant quickly informs Banks that “all the standard serial-killer traits are present and correct”). However, the serial killer Marcus Payne (Payne; pain – get it?), having been given an unnecessarily sound beating during his arrest, goes and dies in hospital before Banks can question him in order to find out if a fifth missing girl is still alive. But don’t panic, I’ve not given away the whole plot, as we critics are infuriatingly apt to do; this was essentially just the set-up of this two-part pilot. Although if you are a fan of this kind of thing, there won’t be much ahead that will surprise you.

Needless to say Banks is a deeply flawed human being. Needless to say he’s on some kind of moral crusade. Needless to say some of his methods are a little suspect. Needless to say he’s being investigated for said methods by someone from Professional Standards who also just happens to be a ruthlessly ambitious, attractive blonde. And so on.

But fortunately at the centre of this somewhat formulaic Leeds-set drama there is a riveting performance by Stephen Tompkinson (last seen in the unwatchable Wild at Heart). Tompkinson so fully inhabits the nervy, awkward Banks that I imagine he went home at the end of each day of filming as drained of the will to live as his character. One wonders what ghastly thoughts the actor forced himself to dwell on in order to make real this exhausted cop who, when not oscillating between righteous anger and crippling despair, seemed on the brink of tears.

We’ve already seen his like recently in the Swedish import Wallander (played in a UK version by Kenneth Branagh). But maverick Banks is far more volatile than Wallander and therefore, arguably, a better TV cop. You really feel for him as, at each stage of the investigation, he is thwarted by circumstance and crippled by his own guilt over a failed marriage and an alphabetised CD collection. So that when he finally gets his suspect in the interrogation room and shouts at them, “You did it!” and beaten, they shout back, “Yes, I did it!”, you forgive the fact that the confession was won not through shrewd psychological cunning (see Robbie Coltrane’s Cracker) but simply through SHOUTING VERY LOUDLY.

I confess I’ve not read any of Peter Robinson’s novels featuring DCI Banks so I couldn’t tell you if they are superior or inferior to this TV drama. But in the end there was nothing embarrassingly bad about Aftermath. It was competently written and directed, had some excellent performances in it, and if a series does materialise I will certainly give it a chance. But any aspirations the writer or director might have had to create something as hypnotically stark and scary as, say, Channel 4’s adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding fell way short.

Yes, there were a couple of moments when the plot surprised or the dialogue rose above the pedestrian, but overall this was just another undemanding police procedural. Eventually even the conceit of the killer’s name was signposted by the glanced tabloid newspaper headline, “The House of Payne”. But perhaps the familiar (with one or two twists to keep us on our toes) is what the majority of viewers want from their crime dramas on these darkening autumn evenings.

• Watch Aftermath on ITV player