By now, viewers of TV thrillers are no strangers to a baffling prologue – but this week brought a particularly extreme example. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue opened with shots of a desert, a cactus, an animal skull nailed to a cross and a moustachioed man driving a battered pick-up truck with a Virgin Mary on the dashboard. So we were definitely in Mexico. For a while, however, that was about all that was clear, as the words ‘Day Nine’ flashed up and the truck’s unidentified female passenger spied on a dilapidated military base through binoculars.
Nor did anything fall into place when the base’s soldiers talked about a mysterious plane manifest and nine corpses found in a pit that were being sent to their isolated spot because ‘they don’t want anyone to know about this’. A helicopter then showed up and the soldiers began unloading body bags.
Fortunately, it wasn’t too long before the reassuring phrase ‘Eight Days Earlier’ appeared and the story began. The scrupulously varied passengers on a small plane from Guatemala to Houston were ordering drinks and, for a couple of minutes, everything seemed fine. It’s rarely a good sign, though, when a pilot breaks into a sweat, struggles frantically with the controls and phones his wife to bid farewell – all of which this pilot now did. And with that, the plane crashed into the jungle.
After it had, the stewardess was dead, but everybody else walked from the wreckage except the injured pilot who had to be carried. Having briskly established that key requirement of any modern thriller – there’s no phone signal – the eight passengers gathered to tell each other (and, obligingly, us) all about themselves.
Or did they? Because it already intriguingly seems that many have secrets to hide, the way people do in a whodunnit – which, by the end of the episode, Nine Bodies had plainly become. During their evening meal, everybody just about rubbed along. But once they were asleep, the music took a turn for the ominous, a raven (or possibly rook or crow – one of those sinister black ones anyway) hopped about agitatedly and somebody accompanied by a POV camera prowled among the sleepers. Whoever it was then jammed a bag over the head of the pilot, who was found dead in the morning to a general horror that one unguessable person must have been faking.
Steve Coogan’s towering comic creation remains as rich as ever
Finally, we returned to Day Nine at that military base where a penny had just dropped. Including the pilot and stewardess, there’d been ten people on the plane. So how come there were only nine bodies in a Mexican morgue?
If you’re picking up And Then There Were None vibes here, a) I don’t blame you; and b) that’s not accidental. The show’s writer, the estimable and apparently unstoppable Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War, Midsommer Murders, more than 50 books), has acknowledged his debt to ‘the greatest, cleverest, most enjoyable mystery Agatha Christie ever wrote’. His plan here is for ‘a modern version’ – and so far he’s making a predictably good job of it. Even that prologue now feels not merely a TV tic but a cheering guarantee that the intrigue, tension, secrets, twists and bodies will continue to pile up.
For more than 30 years, self-doubt and self-confidence have been at war within Alan Partridge – and it’s still not easy to tell which is winning. Of course, if Alan allowed self-awareness more than the occasional terrifying look-in, self-doubt would have triumphed long ago – but, given that he wisely doesn’t, Steve Coogan’s towering comic creation remains as rich as ever.
In How Are You? I’m Alan (Partridge), there’s not much awareness of anything else either, as he presents ‘Britain’s first ever documentary about mental health’ – a problem that ‘nobody has done anything about… until now’.
The way Alan sees it, we’d be shocked to hear he’s had his own issues in this area, which he’s ‘bravely’ admitting. True, his partner is ‘one of the fittest women over 40 in Norfolk’ and, while he mightn’t be a TV presenter any more, ‘a steady stream of Norfolk-based corporate work is just as satisfying’. Yet, he recently collapsed onstage during an event for Bannroyd Pig and Cow Feed (‘enhancing overall carcass quality’) and knows the reason wasn’t physical.
Personally, I wish the satire on TV’s obsession with mental health, on the idea that something so endlessly talked about is ‘taboo’ and on celebs awarding themselves brownie points for breaking the supposed silence had been more sustained in Friday’s first episode. Instead, it soon settled down into a series of fairly familiar scenes of humiliation. On the other hand, virtually every line was perfect – and what is sustained is Coogan’s endearing ability to simultaneously despise and secretly rather like old Alan. Just, I’d suggest, as we do.
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