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CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews this weekend's TV: Violent, drunken, disloyal . . . this cop is so nasty he's all but unwatchable
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Richard Rankin (no relation to the author) gets much closer to the character on the page. Trouble is, he becomes so deeply nasty that the show is all but unwatchable.
Fans of the novels by Sir Ian Rankin understand this, and we try to forgive him his violence, his drunken moods, his cruel sarcasm and his disloyalty. During the next 45 minutes, Rebus punched his brother across the room in front of his own daughter, drank himself senseless, sneered at a detective constable for being new to the job, and ranted about English incomers who have the nerve to fall in love with Edinburgh — 'they stay, they have kids, and they start getting into the environment and cycling about the place like they're in Denmark or something.' He capped this by jumping into his elderly Saab 93, to pay a visit to an old friend, an ex-policeman confined to a wheelchair, who was eaten up with suspicion that his wife was having an affair.
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