Why? Because when you put horribly clichéd dialogue where Keeley Hawes character, DSI Martha Lawson gets told by her boss that the man she’ll be working with is ‘damaged goods’, then in my book you’ve admitted defeat before you’ve even started. Let’s start with Keeley, who is the headline act here. She’s playing a tough and independent women who fancies her co-worker, so she’s never done that before. But more of an issue for her is at the end of the first episode I knew nothing more about her character than I did at the start. I’m not the only person to notice this it seems, because in an interview Keeley did with the Manchester Evening News, she tried to head this off by explaining, “It’s only at the very end of the series that we see the other side of her. It’s good for her to be a little bit mysterious”. But I can’t really blame her entirely, because she’s got alongside her Aidan Gillen (The Wire) playing the man who went undercover for 15 years and appears to have come back as the unknown surly fifth member of Westlife. Remember, he’s ‘damaged goods’, which means not reacting to anything that’s said to him, and looking bored/annoyed in equal measure. He gets a minor reprieve in the storyline at the end, when we realise that he’s still living his undercover life, elevating his character to by far the most interesting on show. That’s hardly a serious competition given how plastic the rest generally are, however. But what disappoints me the most isn’t any of the visible talent here, but the writer Ed Whitmore, who did some excellent work on Waking the Dead. There’s no great idea behind the story here so far other than it’s scary when people steal your identity, and we should all be worried by that. For an opening episode this should grab the viewer and make them want to watch more, but it played like the third story in a 13 episode run on BBC Three. I’m hoping that after this poor start that Identity goes somewhere more interesting in episode two, but my confidence isn’t high.
