James Walton

What Phoebe did next

Plus: Michael Palin has fun in North Korea

After the all-conquering success of Fleabag — her brilliant dark comedy about a smart but rudderless young woman in London — Phoebe Waller-Bridge could presumably have done whatever she wanted for her next TV project. And what she wanted to do next, it now turns out, is very odd indeed.

Killing Eve (BBC1, Saturday) — which Waller-Bridge has adapted from a novel by Luke Jennings but doesn’t appear in — has its moments of recognisably ordinary life. But not many. Near the beginning, for example, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) woke with a Saturday-morning hangover and unwelcome memories of her karaoke performance the night before. Yet within minutes she’d been called into work — which in her case meant arriving at MI5 to be informed that a sex-trafficking Russian politician had just been assassinated in Vienna by having his femoral artery sliced as he walked home with his glamour-model junkie girlfriend Kasia.

As the hangover gags continued, Eve had a sudden hunch that the killer must be a woman. In the traditional way of thriller protagonists, she then went rogue: defying her bosses by interviewing Kasia who’d somehow fled instantly to London while still high on heroin.

Meanwhile, we already knew that Eve’s theory was right, as we’d seen the assassin for ourselves. After flying home from Vienna to Paris, Villanelle (Jodie Comer) also gave a handy demonstration of how chic she is by swanning sexily around the city to the accompaniment of some unusually cool French pop music — until a man with a beard arrived in her apartment and asked her to kill a Mafia leader in Tuscany. This, she efficiently did in a pair of fetching denim shorts and by stabbing him through the eye with a large hairpin.

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