McDonald & Dodds

The ghosts of past detective dramas hover around this playful opening episode to series three. At one point, dialogue spoken by guest actor Alan Davies is accompanied by notes from Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, once the theme tune to his own series Jonathan Creek. And then there’s Davies’s character, a linguistic anthropologist whose skill with phonetics is one that Dodds tries to master in Columbo-esque fashion.

Watching star Jason Watkins blandish the suspects, it’s hard not to come away thinking that his oddball detective sergeant is very much the star of the show. It’s Dodds who always gets the flashes of insight, while ambitious superior DCI McDonald (Tala Gouveia) is routinely left trailing in his wake. But it’s a formula that undoubtedly works, and those worried about the imminent loss of Sunday-night favourite Endeavour will feel very much at home.