Frankie

Eve Myles is probably best known as the star of Doctor Who’s ‘young adult spin-off’ Torchwood. It was jolly enough. It differed from its parent show in two crucial respects. First, it dispensed with a good deal of the ‘running in corridors’ that Doctor Who fans love and replaced it with mild fruitiness. Second, it didn’t waste time travelling to other planets but just waited for aliens to come to Cardiff. Even if you’re not much of a sci-fi fan it’s worth catching the first series just for Eve Myles’s textbook-perfect fringe.

In Eve’s newest venture, Frankie (Tuesday, BBC One, at 9pm), the fringe has gone. So have the aliens. It’s a gritty but still somehow uplifting slice-of life drama about a district nurse. It’s more contemporary than Call The Midwife but I suspect it will have a similar appeal.

Frankie isn’t quite a one woman show, but there’s barely a shot that doesn’t dwell on Eve Myles’s huge, luminous eyes. She’s equal to the burden. Even in the agreeably preposterous Torchwood, her charisma helped viewers swallow an alien invasion of Glamorgan. Here she’s given a believable, rounded character and she makes the most of it.

In the rare non-Eve moments there’s a solid supporting cast. Dean Lennox Kelly (from Shameless, but don’t hold that against him) plays Frankie’s boyfriend, Ian. They’re a devoted couple but Ian sometimes wonders if she doesn’t give a little too much to the job. Derek Riddell, one of those actors who is in everything, is her colleague and confidant, Andy. After one episode I’ve already stopped taking bets on whether we’ll see Frankie and Andy in an impulsive clinch by the end of the series.

But that’s not the only engaging drama series with a likeable female lead starting this week. ITV is launching the tense police thriller Life Of Crime (Friday, ITV, at 10pm). It stars Hayley Atwell as the ambitious police officer, Denise Woods. The story spans three decades, starting amid the 1985 Brixton riots, and tracing Denise’s career as she climbs the career ladder. As high as she climbs, though, she never forgets a murder she failed to prevent as a rookie cop.

Life Of Crime is beautifully written, sensitively acted, and boasts a tremendous cast. Apart from the always-watchable Atwell, we have Richard Coyle and Con O’Neill as fellow officers. ITV’s drama productions are particularly strong at the moment and I’m sure Life Of Crime will become another must-watch series.

The only thing I had against it was the colour space it lives in. Perhaps the final version will be different but the preview was a muted, sepia-looking affair that made everything look as if it might have been happening in 1915 rather than 1985. I was in Brixton in 1985. It was a lot more colourful than it looks here.

Hayley Atwell is about to move on to the superhero movie sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger, so I doubt if we’ll see much more of Life Of Crime past these three episodes, but I’m sure Frankie will run and run.