Unhurried and accomplished whodunit: ITV’s Holding reviewed

A couple of years ago, I happened to read Graham Norton’s third novel Home Stretch. Rather patronisingly, perhaps, I was surprised by how accomplished it was, especially in its sympathetic but melancholy portrait of life in a West Cork village. Yet, judging from ITV’s new adaptation of his first novel Holding, this was something he’d pulled off before – because, here again, it’s pretty clear both why Norton would want to write kindly about the kind of place he grew up in, and why he would have wanted to leave it.

Monday’s first episode efficiently established the rural-Irish setting with shots of fields, cows and wind turbines. We then saw the village policeman P.J. Collins (Conleth Hill) called away from a breakfast of sausages fried in about half a pound of butter following an emergency phone call – the emergency in question being that somebody had painted their house in a colour the village busybody didn’t approve of. ‘It’s just not a crime, Mrs O’Driscoll,’ he explained gently, to her undiminished fury.

The next scene was half-funny and half-sad too, as a Mrs Riordan tried to get her children ready for school (‘Carmel, take that bucket off your head’) while also wrestling a bottle of whisky and a cigarette from her acid-tongued old mother. And with that, we cut to three lonely, orphaned adult sisters in a nearby farm where one was planning an escape to San Francisco that became increasingly unlikely.

But before long – and to his obvious unease – P.J. was faced with a real crime. Builders demolishing a deserted farmhouse had come across the remains of Tommy Burke, who 20 years before had left the future Mrs Riordan (Siobhan McSweeney) waiting at the altar on their wedding day – mainly, it would now seem, because he’d just been murdered.