New Tricks Series 7

I mistakenly asked to review New Tricks thinking it was a new Police drama by the BBC. It was to some surprise when New Tricks Series 7 arrived, and it got me wondering why I had never come across it before, especially as I tend to have a soft spot for British crime drama. A quick bit of research showed me that New Tricks began life as one off episode early in 2003, but attracted a significant enough number of viewers that the BBC commissioned an eight episode season from it. It’s popularity only increased and more recently the BBC have announced that they want a ninth and tenth season of the show.

The show’s history however, meant nothing to me at this stage, because I was now faced with having to jump into a TV show at the beginning of it’s seventh season, which can be very tricky because you know nothing – or very little – of the back-story.

All I really knew about New Tricks was that it was based around the work of the work of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad (UCOS), was made up of retired police officers lead by the much younger Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman. 

The first thing I noticed, to by relief, was that it was easy to jump in to the show – there seemed to be little back story to catch up on, and the show seemed content to be solving a different unsolved case each week, rather than bothering with a cumbersome bigger story-line running parallel to the cases.

New Ticks is a bit of an odd-ball police drama, with the unit of geriatrics who use out dated methods, a wealth or personal knowledge of historic cases and some very un-PC approaches to crime solving.

It’s certainly a character based show, and the characters are varied, but have great chemistry and work well together. A mix of curious cases mixed with a healthy dose of humour and a refreshing absence of tech reliant crime solving solutions – one of the old dogs rides a push bike, sometimes when investigating a case – makes New Tricks a uniquely invigorating experience.

FILMGUIDE rating:

Reviewed by: Jonathan Read