Every episode of this new ITV crime drama ends with a Line of Duty star crooning over a grand piano. Get past that, and he’s brilliant as a troubled ex-cop who can’t let an old case go
OK, we need to get something out of the way before we embark on the review proper of the new, 90-minutes-a-pop, Adrian Dunbar vehicle Ridley (ITV). Which is that the best friend of Ridley’s late wife owns a nightclub and Ridley (Dunbar) sings in it, playing us out at the end of every episode. Dunbar has a lovely voice, but these scenes are so clearly there to showcase that fact that the force of the ineluctable cringe threatens to crack the spines of unwary watchers. So just, you know, be warned that it’s coming up and every time you see the moodily lit grand piano heave into view, brace yourself.
Now, on with the show. We are in a very wintry Lancashire (it is as odd now to see characters wrapped up against the cold as it was to see them maskless and within six feet of each other during the height of lockdown) and Ridley is a forcibly retired detective who had a breakdown after his wife and daughter died in a house fire.
