Some time ago, I noticed that a lot of filmed crime stuff relied on the idea of two cops, ill-matched, being brought together on a job and ends up with the said cops becoming firm friends. Well, I thought wouldn’t it be a great idea to have two cops who, wait for it, began as great friends but ended up as enemies. What a fuckin’ brilliant idea, so I sat down to write this blockbuster in the making only to find that I couldn’t write for toffee. Ah well, never mind, since the writer of Low Winter Sun, showing in two parts on C4 has got there first. Set in Edinburgh, it’s some way more chillingly north of the comfy Rebus trope and eschews the police procedural schtick of Glasgow-set Taggart. Yes, there has been a muhrrduhrr (several as it turns out), but the main McGuffin has the two cops played by Mark Strong and Brian McCardie disposing of one of their own by drowning him in a bath of sea water and then dumping the body in The Forth. How cool is that?

Low Winter Sun is cleverly written, well shot, well acted, ticks all the right noir boxes and I’d certainly recommend anything with Mark Strong in it. But Mark is English so the question on every right-thinking Scot’s lips is :"What’s the accent like?" OK, actually.

Strong has managed to capture the peculiar cadence of the Edinburgh accent with one unfortunate failing - when the character gets a bit agitated, Strong slips into a sort of CU Jimmy stream of babble that’s difficult to follow. If there is a plotting weakness in the show , it’s the character played by McCardie. He’s a good enough actor but the plot calls for him to be so riven with guilt at committing murder that the character periodically goes off into a wild-eyed, frothy-mouthed strop. It does make one think that the legit cops investigating the muhrrduhrr might pause for a second and think "why has this guy suddenly gone apeshit. There must be a reason, what could it be?"

Low Winter Sun is a brave attempt to emulate the quality of US-based crime dramas but perhaps suffers a bit from compression- it might have worked better with the consequences of the murder woven into a series (a la The Shield), but its still worth watching.

BBC Scotland have been running a series of comedy pilots on Friday nights but I only managed to catch the last one, set in Glasgow and featuring the exploits of two market traders. Legit was funny in parts but suffered from the imposition of a laughter track that suggested the makers were a bit nervous about the show’s likely reception. And, the delivery was a bit frenetic, with the principals playing to the Gods a bit too much as if they weren’t confident that the material would survive being delivered in a lower key.