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9 hours ago
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If Virdee is what we get to mark the naming of Bradford as this year’s city of culture (congratulations, Bradford!) then I’m going to need it to be so anointed until at least 2029. The six-part thriller is an adaptation by Amit Dhand of his own book City of Sinners. It’s the third in a series set in the troubled West Yorkshire town and centred round Detective Harry Virdee and his conflicted personal and professional loyalties, and I am going to need them all.
This is a switchbacking ride from the off. We open with a man apparently on the run from the police, until it turns out he is the police. Virdee (Game of Thrones’ Staz Nair) is in pursuit of the man he suspects can give him the whereabouts of missing teenager Ateeq Farooqi (Yousef Naseer). But, after the eventual arrest, he is taken to task by his brother-in-law Riaz (Vikash Bhai) for not letting him handle the matter “unofficially”. They are on the same side here, he insists to Virdee. A missing kid is bad for business. It is clear that Riaz is a very shady brother-in-law indeed, but neither Virdee the man nor Virdee the show is in the habit of lingering, so with the first of many tantalising set-ups complete, he is off to a friend’s wedding to plunge us into the maelstrom of difficulties that is his private life.
Virdee is estranged from his Sikh family after marrying Saima (Aysha Kala), a Muslim woman; their attendance at the wedding is an attempt at rapprochement. Despite his mother’s longing to welcome her son and daughter-in-law back into the fold – via a scene so unexpectedly moving that I was on the verge of tears – his father will not countenance it. The next scene between them, when Virdee takes food to his parents’ house to see if they can be welcomed for Diwali, is so painful it is hard to watch. It is also emblematic of Dhand’s great talent for finding the emotionally universal in the culturally specific. Parental hopes and dreams, however unreasonable, die hard and familial misery knows no bounds.
Against this backdrop of quietly shattering scenes and their flipside (the deeply romantic, tender bond between Virdee and Saima that has been forged in the fire) unfurls an incredibly satisfying plot. As the missing boy’s absence stretches into its third week, the detective and his new partner DS Amin (Danyal Ismail) piece together his involvement in the county lines’ drug trade, and his work as an informant while a turf war begins to brew between the two rival gangs wanting control of the city. As the hunt for the child becomes more desperate, Virdee moves ever closer to Riaz’s side of the line. The idea of the conflicted cop is of course one with which we are familiar, but it is given fresh life here – in a situation where corruption begins to seem almost like sheer common sense. Do the bad thing to a bad man and get a good family their boy back. If you can’t fix your own family, at least do what you can to fix theirs.
Dhand says he wrote the book first in the form of a screenplay and it shows. There is no waste: everything that happens is punchy and earns its place. He has a gift of an actor in Nair, whose charisma allows Virdee to be ineffably cool and also wholly convincing as a man still struggling to come out from the shadow of his father’s influence and build a life that is properly his own. Dhand’s show is a minor study in masculinity as well as in racial, religious and intra-community divisions, and it does all this with a light but wholly assured touch.
And it is, throughout, tremendous fun; the action moves fast and touches on most of the traditional thriller tropes only to give them a fresh new spin as it flies past. I hope Dhand is already hard at work adapting the next book. Here’s to Bradford, city of culture 2025-29!
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Virdee aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
