Tucci is a smug prisoner; David Tennant is a sweet vicar with a secret. Their tales come together confidently in this funny and typically meaty mystery from Steven Moffat
I wonder how Anthony Hopkins feels about being a serial killer, not just for an age but, the way things are shaping up, for all time? It is 31 years since he gave us his Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs – since he sucked his teeth and looked down the lens straight into our livers and spoke in the light, Larry Hagmanish drawl that made everything he said 300 times more gruesome. He remains the nonpareil and it is hard to come out from under his boiler-suited shadow.
In the new Steven Moffat drama Inside Man (BBC One), Stanley Tucci is burdened by many parallels with the great man/awful character. He plays Jefferson Grieff, a softly spoken, highly intelligent prisoner, on death row for murdering his wife. People come to him for insight into their stalled cases and he enjoys toying with them until he deigns to provide his unsettled visitors with solutions to their problems. The latter are deduced in a manner that can only be described with reference to another great man/awful character, Sherlock Holmes, whom Moffat himself resurrected in a way that will probably prove as hard to beat for the next few generations. Tucci works hard to make him his own man, but it is elsewhere that the real innovation lies.
