You will have a wild ride watching this ineffably cool Bradford-based cop thriller. But it’s also surprisingly moving – and may well leave you in tears
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 aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
