Turning Frank Gallagher into a British Columbo!

If, as an actor, you set out to re-invent yourself after years spent playing television’s most engaging lay-about, then moving from Frank Gallagher – the bone idle star of the brilliant Shameless – to a world-weary, soon-to-retire cop on an investigation that only you appear to give a continental about should just about cover it on every front.

The amazing thing is that David Threlfall is such a fine actor, you actually forget Frank within 10 minutes of the start of What Remains, the enthralling new four-part murder drama on BBC1.

And you’re hooked on Detective Inspector Len Harper, a sort of modern day, north of England version of Columbo – albeit with a battered leather coat instead of a filthy mac – who happens to be on his very last day on the job when a body is found in the attic of a South London house of flats.

The mummified corpse is that of Melissa, an overweight, unhappy single woman who lived in flat number five on the top floor, who one day went up into the attic, never to return – and never to be missed by any of the other inhabitants of this rambling old house over the intervening two years.

That’s actually what bothers Harper more than the discovery itself – how could a woman that all of these flat-dwellers saw every day just disappear into the attic and nobody even noticed she was missing?

Harper mightn’t the most dynamic animal within the ranks of the Met’s finest, moving as he does at a pace not unfamiliar in tortoises, but he does care about his job – and, as it turns out, he cares about little else.

He certainly doesn’t care about his appearance because he has a hairstyle that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a medieval monk, complete with a fringe that looks like it was cut with a butter knife in the dark.

He lives alone since the death of his wife; with no children and clearly no cleaner for a house that is now about four times too big for his needs.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.