The Body Farm sees Tara Fitzgerald reprise her highly successful Waking the Dead character Dr Eve Lockhart but in a far inferior series
“Are you a cop?
‘No I’m a scientist’
What you doing here then?”
Of all the Waking the Dead characters to get a spin-off, Tara Fitzgerald’s Dr Eve Lockhart was definitely the right one to choose. Which makes the relative rubbishness of The Body Farm all the more disappointing. The beauty of the mother series was that it had all the investigative elements for a police procedural in place in balance. Unsurprisingly, The Body Farm shifts the focus to the forensics but still tries to achieve the same case-of-the-week results.
Which means it falls into Silent Witness territory with the role of the police laughably sidelined as Lockhart and her team stride forcefully (in protective clothing natch) into crime scenes and take over the investigation of any number of crimes. Keith Allen is on hand as grizzled DI Hale as the token representation in blue but otherwise, it is the forensic team who far over-reach themselves in a way which is watchable but somewhat flat.
There’s the ex-lover (Mark Bazeley’s handsome Mike), the non-conformist (Wunmi Mosaku’s Rosa) and the shut-in (Finlay Robertson’s Oggy) but we don’t really have enough time to get to know them in this set of cases. And there’s only so many forensic procedures we can get invested in (which is why they have to turn their hand to investigating), it sadly just doesn’t work as engaging TV. A real shame, given how good Tara Fitzgerald can be, with this character or otherwise.
