Friday night refreshment

BBC2 has a new drama series for Friday nights. The main character is a world-weary middle-aged police inspector with an unshakeable commitment to smoking. His work partner is a feisty female officer in her twenties who combines salt-of-the-earth irreverence with being a damn good cop. Between them, they’re investigating the murder of an attractive young woman who their colleagues immediately assumed was a prostitute, and whose death reminds the inspector of a previous investigation that continues to haunt him — which is why his boss is constantly trying to take him off the case.

But if this makes you think that The City & The City is yet another identikit crime drama, then you couldn’t be more wrong. The basic storyline may be thoroughly conventional; but only, it seems, as a deliberate counterpoint to the intriguing and highly imaginative strangeness of the setting.

Inspector Borlu (David Morrissey) does his policing in the city of Beszel, a place that goes beyond the merely fictional and into the realms of mythical. Its trappings have the feel of Eastern Europe — especially those parts that have resisted a smoking ban — but its citizens speak in English, which they learned from British traders 500 years ago. They write in English too, although with a sprinkling of random accents — as in a poster warning that the secret police ‘löök jušt liké yöu and me’.

More mysteriously still, Beszel directly borders another fictional/mythical city called Ul Qoma, and relations between the two are not so much strained as completely forbidden. Any tourists who (inexplicably) visit Beszel must attend a two-week training course instructing them in such local etiquette as never even looking at Ul Qoma, and ideally developing an inability to see it.