When did Sunday night TV become so grim? Baptiste reviewed
There was, you may remember, a time when Sunday night television was rather a jolly affair: gently plotted and full of rosy-cheeked yokels, twinkly coppers and warm-hearted patriarchs. Well, not any more — as BBC1’s Baptiste and ITV’s Professor T confirm. Both feature main characters, and quite a few supporting ones, with backstories so abidingly grim that you can only hope they don’t send out annual Christmas circulars. So it is that Julien Baptiste — French detective turned freelance missing-persons hunter — now has a dead daughter to go with his imprisoned son. Meanwhile, Cambridge academic Jasper Tempest’s OCD is clearly linked to the fact that, at the age of
