Howay our Vera, man.

Imagine being a writer facing a production company and pitching a new series to them. It must be nerve racking as you say, ‘Well…it’s about a detective.’ The simultaneous eye-rolling must make you feel as if you’re watching some old zombie film. ‘Wait, wait. Not an ORDINARY detective, this one has a bit of a gimmick.’ Now you’ve got them interested. You then go on to explain that the main character wears a beret and smokes cannabis; or drives an impossibly old car; or is a conjoined twin; or exists only in the imagination of a recently beached dolphin, anything, in fact, to give the tired old format a bit of a twist.

‘Are they in any way ‘maverick’?’ you are asked.

‘Yes. They have their own way of doing things.’

‘Great,’ they say, ‘put six scripts in the post and I’ll get straight on to ITV1 and tell them to stop worrying about their 8pm Sunday slot.’

Vera (ITV Sunday 8pm) has none of the above gimmicks, but she does have a quirky hat and a raincoat that she wears at all times and the series is lent an element of novelty by featuring a ‘National Treasure’ actress who operates in a reasonably picturesque, and largely under exposed part of the country. Stephen Fry tried it a few years ago in Norfolk with ‘Kingdom’ but found that trying to make a cross between P G Wodehouse and Rumpole of the Bailey whilst giving all his friends some work during their summer holidays in Burnham Market didn’t make for great television. (Didn’t stop ITV lapping it up for a couple of years, but that’s advertising revenue for you.)

The main advantage of setting a crime drama on the rugged coastline of Northumberland is that it gives the characters a lot of opportunity to stare out at the sea. And Vera does a hell of a lot of staring out at the sea. She gazes wistfully, she contemplates thoughtfully and she watches reflectively as waves crash off the rocks and batter the shoreline with relentless force. As she stares she is, no doubt, wondering if her career with the Northumberland & City Police is necessarily going in the right direction. No matter where she goes, up and down this picturesque but often brutal county, there is murder and conspiracy at every turn. You’d think she would be looking to settle down a bit now. There are no end of bowls clubs, W.I. meetings and art classes being run for elderly spinsters in the north-east. Surely, Vera doesn’t want to be uncovering one cadaver after another, week in week out, and then spending the next few days hearing the tissue of lies that the unfortunate deceased’s family and friends have woven in order to give themselves a water tight alibi, does she? The sea, however, simply keeps crashing against the shore and offers no immediate answer so Vera blinks, shakes her head, and gets on with today’s business in hand, namely, explaining the suspicious death of Gemma Wyatt, apparently washed up on the rocks of a remote and inaccessible island just off the coast.

Brenda Blethyn gives one of those solid ‘I’m going to be a National Treasure if I live much longer so you may as well sit down and watch’ performances as DCI Vera Stanhope, a slightly dishevelled lady who rarely finds time to change her clothing during an episode and approaches every murder investigation sensitively yet slightly detached, as if she’s officiating at the funeral of her grandson’s pet rabbit. She heads up a team of detectives with Geordie accents ranging from the authentic to the barely credible, with one or two bordering on extras from Citizen Khan. Her modus operandi is to question witnesses as if she’s making those matter-of-fact, yet slightly intrusive observations that the check-out lady makes when she spots a new brand of fabric conditioner in your shopping. Thus she gathers information that the rest of the Northumberland & City Police force regard as irrelevant but which, you can be certain, will eventually lead to a trail of clues that will enable her to eliminate everybody but the murderer.

Vera’s latest interrogations reveal a web of intrigue around the visitors and inhabitants of the small, wild-life island of Ternstone, the Galapagos of the North-East, as one suspect after the other presents her with a motive and an opportunity to have done the deadly deed. Turns out that nearly everyone has done something that they would rather not tell anybody about so Vera inadvertently solves half a dozen other mysteries before she lands upon the solution to the main puzzle, which she inevitably does whilst staring wistfully seawards, eating fish and chips out of the paper.

As in all the best and hammiest cop dramas, she ends up with the perpetrator nicely seated before her as she reveals exactly why and how the murder was carried out. There are a few details on which she is slightly sketchy but the killer helpfully fills in these blanks for her. I’m sure if Vera had said, ‘tell you what, pet, would you mind slipping these handcuffs on and driving yourself down to the station?’ the murderer would have done so, pausing only to sign a written confession.

There’s another three of these two-hour mysteries to come which will, no doubt, lead us into another series of “Midsomer Murders” or “Morse circa 1964” or “Inspector ‘Del Boy’ Frost”. None of them are much good, but they’re all about two million times better than Murder in Paradise.