Let’s twist again

What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a certain age pottering about at home when he’s suddenly and shockingly murdered by asphyxiation. You then roll the opening credits, forget about the dead guy and introduce the main character, who’s asked to take part in some sort of mission — and agonises about whether to accept or to leave the whole series somewhat stranded. At least, this is exactly what happened in both of this week’s big new Sunday-night dramas: BBC1’s Baptiste and Channel 4’s Traitors.

In Baptiste, the pre-credits murder was of an apparently harmless shell-collector in Deal — and the main character is, of course, Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo), the ageing French detective whose endless Gallic wisdom proved so popular in The Missing that he’s now been given his own series. When we met Baptiste on Sunday, he’d recently retired to Amsterdam to spend more time delivering his little aphorisms with his family. (‘Intelligence without ambition,’ he informed his son-in-law, ‘is a bird without its wings.’) He was also keen to tell anyone who’d listen that ‘I’m not the man I was’ — although he seemed pretty much the same to me: still given to staring thoughtfully a lot and, at moments of particularly high tension, removing his specs.

Naturally, his retirement didn’t last long. As luck would have it, the Amsterdam police commissioner is an old flame, and when she heard of the mysterious disappearance of a young sex worker, she soon snapped into action by asking him to help, leaving him to do all the work and withdrawing to her office with a hipflask. Fortunately, Baptiste did have one useful contact: the missing girl’s uncle Edward (Tom Hollander), who’d come from Britain to find her.