Television: What 'ave we here then - a Geordie cracker

ON WATCH: Brenda Blethyn in the Vera series on TV One, Saturdays, is worth watching. PHOTO/SUPPLIED A-271112SPLTIMEOUT7

Acclaimed British crime drama series Vera featuring one of today's best actresses, Brenda Blethyn, is fine viewing.

Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope is a well-rounded Geordie woman with limp hair, a battered sou'wester hat clamped on her head, a worn old green coat and sensible rubber boots who drives an old Jeep.

There is no glamour. This programme is always about the police work, and Vera works herself and her staff at top speed.

Last Saturday (TV One, 9.35pm), The Prodigal Sonhad Vera and her team at the Northumberland Police hot on an investigation into a former metropolitan officer who had been stabbed to death outside a Newcastle nightclub.

Blethyn is without a doubt the nucleus of this programme.

It is absolutely all about her.

A wonderful workaholic who is cynical, courageous and at times hugely funny. And Blethyn has that rare ability to toss off one-liners with aplomb, and guile.

Equipped with bright, bird-like eyes and a seemingly innocent smile, her soft Geordie voice could seem soothing and ineffectual to many of the people she talks to throughout the case. But they quickly realise that her questions - liberally peppered with "duck", "love" or "pet" - are not.

Vera is astute, with a practically psychic talent for delving and discovering inside information.

In a newspaper interview, Blethyn had said she was an expert in making herself ugly and couldn't care less about the way she looked on screen.

"If you did, you'd never play the interesting parts," she said.

So while other actresses complain that the roles decrease as you age, Blethyn, at 66, doesn't have that problem.

"I'm the reverse of actresses whose careers seem to peter out at the age of 40. Mine seemed to get better from that point on."

Blethyn's Vera in her dowdy persona is always disarming and warm. But when she gets the bit between her teeth and the trail is hotting up her chatter changes, becoming clipped and uncompromising.

We don't know anything about this character's personal life.

One can only assume when sheheads off into the sunset at theclose of each programme, an older woman alone in a beat-up Jeep, that she's quite possibly a very lonely police inspector indeed.

Then there's her relationship with her young sergeant who is with her at every turn and who she treats like a son.

This complex woman, who is far removed from your usual police inspector, says when she has a hunch about a suspect: "There's summat about him, he makes my teeth itch."

And she was on the money, the future brother-in-law of the dead man, a wealthy brewery owner, made Vera's teeth itch the minute she met him.

For me, the inimitable Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope is well worth watching.

Just as long you're not keen on fast cars, smart fashion and guns - you're in.