The first recording today starts with the end of Holby City, featuring Adrian Edmondson, which I wasn’t expecting.
There’s a new Eastenders trail.
And a new trail for DanceX.
Plus a trail for Ultimate Rock Climb.
Then, another episode of Waking the Dead – Cold Fusion Part One.
It starts in 1988, when a meeting protesting the local Nuclear Power Station in Dunwell is disrupted by the ex husband of the speaker, who’s violating a restraining order even being there.
When the speaker and her new boyfriend return to their cottage, there’s someone in the house, and they’re both attacked. Next day, an anonymous call tips the police off that something happened there, and two officers from the Atomic Energy Constabulary attend. One of them is a young Spencer Jordan, with a colleague who’s quite happy to bring his pistol, despite that not being authorised outside the power plant. They discover the man dead in the hall, and the woman hanging from a light fitting, with her face cut off.
The case comes back to the cold case unit when Penny Coulter, the ex-wife of the murdered man (who we also saw at the protest looking quite cross at the woman speaker) comes in with some evidence that casts doubt on the ex-husband, Toby Holmes, being the murderer. A blood-stained sweatshirt was found in his incinerator, which Toby said was planted there. Penny has found a photograph on an old roll of film that was in her ex-husband’s camera, and has only just been processed, showing him wearing that sweatshirt.
Boyd deliberately doesn’t tell Spence that they’re re-opening the case, ostensibly not to distract him from his current court case. But Spence gets invited to the pub by his old colleague from the time, with whom he attended the murder, Tom McQueen.
Next day, Felix notices that the evidence box from the case had been moved, and security logs show that Spence’s card was used during the night to gain access. But the cameras don’t show who moved the box.
There’s breaking news that Central Lab, a forensic science lab, where Felix had sent a blood-stained light fitting to see if they can get a DNA sample, had partially burned down due to an arson attack. David Calder pops up playing Commander Drake of the Anti-Terrorist squad. So it looks like someone was looking for the evidence, and then burned down the lab to destroy it when they didn’t find it there.
Boyd finally talks to Spence about the case. Meanwhile, Felix is looking through Spence’s emails, having told Stella that she’s scanning for a virus. She finds an email from Tom McQueen inviting Spence for drinks. Boyd asks Spence when he last saw McQueen, and Spence lies, saying “not recently”.
Stella checks with IT to ask if they’ve had a virus reported, and they tell her no. Then she gets a message from someone called WD1. “Failed to intercept hard drive – has it turned up yet?” She replies “No, but 100% they know about break-in. Think SPENCER JORDAN responsible.” Yikes. Stella is a spy? A little later, she gets another message. “If and when hard drive arrives offer your services and corrupt if necessary.”
Grace goes to prison to interview Toby Holmes, who was convicted of his wife’s murder, and that of her boyfriend. He does a bit of psycho headgames, but ends up sobbing about his murdered wife. Could be an act, I guess.
Someone in a hazmat suit is booby trapping a fake book with some powder, then puts it in an envelope with a birthday card, and hands it off to another man who bikes it over to the police station, addressed to Spencer. They’re not trying to hide the cloak and dagger aspect of this case.
Spence confronts McQueen about the break-in. He denies it. But he does tell Spence that at the time he knew the anti-nuclear protestors were under government surveillance, because he’d been approached by David Calder’s character, Drake, to do some work for them.
Felix’s friend from Central Lab arrives with his PC, which has the DNA sequence from the evidence on its hard drive, but it can’t start up. Sure enough, Stella offers her services, and Felix lets her get on with it.
Stella does go through the drive – what’s going on with this font? I don’t think it’s typos (as it so often is for screen graphics) it looks more like badly spaced characters. She’s just about to delete everything from the disc when Boyd tells her she’s needed for Grace’s interview with Penny Coulter.
Coulter tells them that she was “recruited by a private detective called Clifford Day, a horrible, weasly little man. He said he worked for MI5 and that he’d seen intelligence that proved Marcus was planning something with some Spanish ecoterrorists.” “So what was this something?” “Tunnelling into Dunwell. Strictly against our “anything as long as it’s legal” mantra.” “So the way Clifford Day sold it to you, it would be them that were betraying the organisation, not you.” “Even then, I’m not sure I really believed that. I still had a front door key and I’d go in and poke about while they were out.” Then Felix and friend find a DNA Match – it’s Clifford Day.
Spence gets the info about Clifford Day, and heads straight out to arrest him. It’s all getting a bit personal. He tells Boyd where he’s going, but ignores him when he tells him he shouldn’t go alone.
Felix finds evidence that Stella was trying to corrupt the hard drive, and goes to confront her, but Stella is talking to her mother, in French, so Felix waits. But she sees the book that was sent to Spence, and which he hasn’t opened. Felix opens it and gets a face full of whatever powder was put in there. I’m very nervous now, because this is the last story in this series.
Media Centre Description: Police drama series based around cold cases. A murder case that Spencer worked on whilst a policeman at the Atomic Energy Commission is under review – DNA evidence looks set to reveal the murderer of two anti-nuclear campaigners in the 1980s.
Recorded from BBC ONE on Tuesday 14th August 2007 20:58
BBC Genome: BBC ONE Tuesday 14th August 2007 21:00
After this, a trail for The One Show which might be the first one I’ve seen – it certainly sounds like an introductory trail, with presenters Adrian Chiles and Myleene Klass. (Wikipedia suggests the series started in July.) Fun Fact, My office at the BBC was in the same building as the One Show studio, which was the floor above the Top Gear production office. Bonus fun fact – when I was developing the XBox 360 version of iPlayer (a couple of years after this) we didn’t have suitable video feeds at the start, so the only video clip we had was a clip of the opening sequence of The One Show. I got so bored with watching this every single time I started playing a video (which, as you can imagine, is something I had to do rather a lot) that I emailed the team who did all the video encoding, to ask if they had something, anything that wasn’t the opening of TOS. So they very kindly gave us a different feed – the opening of Torchwood – which was far more up my street, and a lot less annoying to have to watch over and over.
There’s also a trail for the BBC Proms and for BBC News 24 online.
Then the recording stops after the opening of the News at Ten. The leading story is a massive recall of Chinese made toys by Mattel, over safety fears from lead paint and small magnets.
The next recording today starts with the end of an episode of The Book Quiz. I notice in the quickfire round, Val McDermid gets almost all the answers, while Toby Young stays uncharacteristically silent. He got the last question, though.
There’s another trail for Stephen Fry’s Weekend.
There’s also a trail for The Secret Life of the Motorway.
Then, a repeat of Life on Mars which I looked at on its original broadcast.
Media Centre Description: Drama series about Sam Tyler, a Manchester detective who suffers a near-fatal car crash and wakes up in what seems to be 1973. When a man’s wife and daughter are kidnapped and held hostage, Sam is determined to shake the demons from his head and focus on the investigation. He starts by interviewing all of A-Division, gaining a privileged insight into their perspectives. But when a worse-for-wear Sam isn’t at hand, Annie is left exposed as she deduces for herself the identity of the kidnapper.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Tuesday 14th August 2007 21:58
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Tuesday 14th August 2007 22:00
There’s another trail for Stephen Fry’s Weekend and The Secret Life of the Motorway.
Then the recording stops after a few minutes of Midnight’s Grandchildren.