Silent Witness Series 12 Episodes 1 & 2 - Safe

Often underrated and ignored in favour of similar-styled shows, such as the mind-numbingly tedious CSI, Silent Witness has been going on strong for 12 series now and it really has improved with age!

The show originally featured Amanda Burton’s character Sam Ryan, a forensic pathologist and the show set in Cambridge. The setting eventually moved to London and despite her colleagues constantly changing, only Sam remained the permanent fixture.

However series 6 came about and Leo and Harry (William Gaminara and Tom Ward) joined Sam, who was to leave at the start of series 8. This gave the writers the chance to move the series on from just concentrating on one character and give the series more consistency. Later on in the series, Nikki (Emilia Fox) was to join the team, now headed by Leo and the series has gone from strength to strength ever since.

In this story, after driving home from a social shindig, Leo is stopped by the police and breath-tested. Unfortunately he is just over the limit and he is sentenced to community service - helping a football coach at a local estate. The coach isn’t too happy with this and with the gang culture hanging over the estate, a ‘drunk whitey’ isn’t going to help, is he?

Meanwhile a young girl is found dead at a fun fair. It seems she’s been murdered but the police are baffled. Whilst at the scene, Nikki is ‘picked up’ by a paramedic, which won’t go down well with fans of the Harry-Nikki story, which has been brewing for the last couple of series!

It seems that the murder is gang-related and connected to the estate Leo is on, after some mobile phone footage, displaying the murder, is found. After the person, who stabbed the girl, is gunned down, the murderer is believed to be the girl’s ‘boyfriend’. The lad though, didn’t want to be part of the gang and while he is trying to keep his little brother away from it, he himself was stabbed by the gang and saved by Leo. Instead of keeping away from them, he joined back up to get revenge for the girl’s stabbing.

Later the lad was killed in revenge, by the rival gang. Quite shockingly too! Still the police and pathologists didn’t a clue. Nobody was willing to talk to them but those people expected the police to protect them. It was quite interesting to hear that, how can they protect you, if you don’t tell them anything?

Well that statement was put into context later, as the murdered lad’s younger brother, who had been a runner for the gang, was to tell Leo about the gang and their involvement in events. Leo promised that he wouldn’t let nobody harm him but when the police went blundering in and arrested the gang’s leader, the rest of the gang sought out the young boy and set a dog on him and made sure he was dead by knifing him. It was quite shocking just to hear what they did, I didn’t think they would kill the young lad off to be honest. Sad thing is though, that probably happens for real.

Even though they proved that the dog ravaged the boy and with no knife to prove it, it seems that the CPS doesn’t agree it was murder, so the gang leader is in the clear. That is until Leo, gutted from the young boy’s murder, tries on last thing. The murdered girl was pregnant, when she was raped as part of a ‘gang initiation’. It turns out that the gang leader was the unlucky man – as the girl was 13, so he is charged.

It’s a relief for Leo who had struck up a bond with some of the kids on the estate. Its bad news for Nikki though, as the paramedic turns out to be a racist, WHOOPS!

It’s a rather difficult subject for the writers to write about, what with the current state of social breakdown and gang culture in this country. They managed to pull it off though and write a good story. With it being on the BBC too, they could have gone all PC but despite threatening to, they just managed to stay on centre, just!

8/10

Next Time – Will Nikki be dating Nick Griffin?