You can see why the BBC has subtitled its much-trailed new series about forensic scientists “The Real CSI”, and not “The Real Silent Witness”. The former, an American show, sounds exciting and vaguely plausible, whereas the latter, the BBC’s own long-running forensics drama, makes one think only of its ultra-beige star, Emilia Fox, wandering around unconvincingly in her paper mask and all-in-one white suit. But still, there’s no getting away from it. Forensics: The Real CSI (1 May, 9pm) is Silent Witness minus its neatness, decorum and carefully polite dialogue. It’s so dreadfully real, and because of this it squeezes at the heart even when events turn out, as they often do, to be anticlimatic. Here are Geordie accents, nondescript offices and blood that is brown-black rather than red. Here are families destroyed in as long as it takes to open a front door. Here, in other words, are snapshots of Britain in all its muddle and misery.
We are among the men and women of the Northumbria Police. The first episode followed two cases, both in Newcastle. On a housing estate, a woman had been injured following a shooting at her home, a possible warning to her boyfriend who was to appear as a witness in a criminal trial; and in a disordered terraced house, a 50-something white male had been found face down beneath his desk, the victim of what looked at first like a stabbing. The police officers talked of “the harvest”: the gathering of forensic material that must be completed in the first minutes and hours after they arrive at a crime scene. The forensic pathologist, who is called Nigel Cooper and who has a face that reminds me just a little of Sherlock Holmes as played by Basil Rathbone, talked of how he had to resist the temptation to move a body immediately to a mortuary: some secrets may only be revealed while a person lies where they were found. More movingly, once the body was on a gurney and he was standing beside it, ruler in hand, he talked of the privilege involved in his job. Post-mortems are inevitably stressful: so many people standing by, waiting for answers to impossible questions. Nevertheless, at the centre of all this, there is, for him, quietude – a state born of the fact that a body, with its scars and wrinkles and tattoos, tells the story of a whole life.
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