#oneaday Day 652: New Tricks - done

I've finished watching the full run of New Tricks, the BBC sort-of police procedural about the "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS, a unit in London's Metropolitan Police made up of one actual police officer and several other retired coppers. I enjoyed it a lot, even if the cast changes in its latter seasons arguably made it into a bit of a different show, and it meandered a bit in search of its own identity as a result.

New Tricks opens with UCOS being fronted by Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman), a semi-disgraced police officer who gained notoriety after shooting a dog on a bungled raid that left the person she was supposed to be rescuing paralysed after falling out of a window. She assembles a colourful team of former police officers, including the diamond geezer Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman), the extremely neurodivergent Brian "Memory" Lane and the relatively-normal-but-talks-to-his-dead-wife Jack Halford.

Between them, they form an initially uneasy alliance that subsequently blossoms into both genuine friendship and a wonderful sense of camaraderie as they solve a series of cold cases, many of which have been dormant for 20-30 years or more. As a result, Pullman more than redeems herself in the eyes of her superiors — though she still occasionally gets stick about the whole dog-shooting thing — and her band of merry old men find some meaning in their lives, as well as some closure in some longstanding issues.

This core cast remains constant for a significant proportion of the show, and we get to know them all very well. Halford is the first to leave; after finding closure on the murder of his wife, he departs to live out the end of his life peacefully after discovering he has a terminal illness. Lane is next to go, once again after reaching some closure on his "case that got away" — closure that involves him sacrificing his new career in the name of justice and the truth when he accuses a powerful member of the police for wrongdoing.

Standing lasts the longest, sticking around until the second episode of the show's final season. The two-part story that sees him departing after having faked his own death gives him a good story to go out on; he didn't have quite the same "issues" hanging over his head as Halford and Lane, so he needed something like this to make his departure an event of note in the same way, and it worked well, revealing some hitherto unknown details about his past career that felt very much in keeping with what we had learned about him over the course of the prior eleven seasons.

The replacement cast members include the Glaswegian Steve McAndrew (Denis Lawson), who is rebuilding his life following estrangement from his wife and son; Dan Griffin (Nicholas Lyndhurst), who is a frighteningly competent, knowledgeable individual who acts a bit as the group's "Superman" at times, despite occasionally demonstrating himself to be a bit unaware in terms of social interactions; and the latest to join the group, following Standing's departure, is Ted Case (Larry Lamb), a superstitious but intelligent former detective with a gift for interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects. Outside of the "old men" of the group, Pullman is eventually replaced by Sasha Miller (Tamzin Outhwaite) towards the end of the series, and while this is probably the biggest upheaval the series saw, she settles into the new role quickly and does a good job.

New Tricks, across its entire run, strikes a good balance between the inherent comedy in such an unusual, eccentric ensemble cast, and the inherent darkness of a series about investigating longstanding cold cases, typically murders. The show thankfully sidesteps some of the clichés of police procedurals after its initial episodes; the pilot episode and the first couple of regular episodes give Pullman a superior who is the very definition of the stereotypical "shouting police chief", but before long he is replaced by Robert Strickland (Anthony Calf), an altogether calmer individual who, while coming from a background of privilege, often sides with "the little guy" (relatively speaking) rather than The Establishment as a whole. In the context of the series, this means that while he is often outwardly a by-the-book sort of individual, on the down-low he is immensely supportive of UCOS' eccentricities and lets them get away with a lot — because they get results.

(Yes, I know UCOS can be argued to be part of "The Establishment" also, given that they are a police department in their own right. But New Tricks makes a point of showing that the police as a whole are certainly not infallible, and there are several cases that involve the unit uncovering corruption within the organisation, eventually bringing justice to someone who had been wronged, many years ago in some cases.)

New Tricks' biggest strength is in its characters. We get to know the initial ensemble cast particularly intimately over the course of their time with the show; the later additions are also plenty likeable and get their own stories to shine, though by the simple fact that they have less time on screen in total, we never feel we quite get to know them as well as Pullman, Standing, Lane and Halford. Ted Case is the character who suffers the most in this regard; joining the cast full-time partway into its final season, some of his development feels a little rushed — although this, in itself, works quite well in the context of his character. The reveal that he is gay is handled in a particularly entertaining way that, from the relatively little we know of him at that point, feels very much in keeping with how he does things.

Given that the show ran for a long time — 2003-2015, to be exact — means that things change quite significantly in society over the course of its complete run. The show starts in a pre-smartphone age, for one, though the team are all comfortably using tablets (as in, iPads, not little boxes of pills) by its conclusion, and, as you might expect from the composition of its cast, issues such as sexism and ageism are explored. Several episodes, particularly later in the show's overall run, also deal with crimes that have a racial component or that involve domestic abuse and sexual assault, and while the show isn't particularly gory or shock-horror, it also doesn't shy away from real issues.

I'm sure there's plenty one could criticise about the show as a whole, particularly as today, in 2026, a lot of people have a somewhat skeptical view of the police and their role in society — and the way in which police-centric TV shows can somewhat "whitewash" this fact. But taking it as pure escapism — as a fun detective show with some colourful characters — it was highly entertaining, and I'm glad I took the time to watch it from start to finish.

Now I need something to replace it…

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#oneaday Day 632: New Tricks

Longtime readers may recall that back in November, I started watching a show called New Tricks from the BBC. It's a detective show with an interesting concept: following the exploits of a fictional Metropolitan Police department known as the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad (aka UCOS), the show sees its core cast (which gradually changes over time) reopening various cold cases and getting to the bottom of them.

I'm just coming up on the end of the tenth series out of twelve and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's been a consistently interesting watch, with some excellent characters who have some good backstories that get some decent payoff over the long term. I understand that the point I'm currently watching is where some people feel like it started to run out of steam a bit, leading to, among other things, one of the original cast members moving on because he felt things had become stale and another two departing after an apparently public spat with the writers, but I'm still enjoying the show with its new cast members. Former lead Amanda Redman said she felt like the cast had lost their anarchic edge in the later episodes, and I see why she said that — but really it's just a different vibe thanks to a different set of characters.

Of particular note is the presence of Nicholas Lyndhurst, an actor who I'm sure most people associate with comedic roles thanks to his most well-known appearances as Rodney in Only Fools and Horses and Gary Sparrow in Goodnight Sweetheart, but in New Tricks he does extremely well as a particularly serious-seeming member of the team. He still has his humorous moments, but they're mostly delivered through deadpan humour; the show is somewhat on the "gritty" side, but isn't above a bit of levity, primarily through little character moments.

The show covers an interesting time period, too. It launched in an era before smartphones and ran until the mid-2010s. A lot of things changes about society in that period, in retrospect, and it's interesting to see the show reflect that. Quite a few early episodes of the show are about Redman's Detective Superintendent Pullman character having to fight to be taken seriously in a world that is still very much male-dominated — and particularly after her assignment to UCOS came after a botched raid in which she shot a dog — and there are frequent explorations of the challenges people with mental health concerns have to face in their daily life.

Of particular note in this regard is the character Brian "Memory" Lane, who is a recovering alcoholic and highly likely to be autistic. Some of the best character moments in the show come from an exploration of Brian struggling to deal with simply existing in a world that he doesn't quite feel comfortable in, and the unique challenges he faces considering his background and his daily struggles. He could easily have become a pathetic, tragic character, but the show handles him well and shows that people contending with the things he is dealing with still have something to offer society, and that they can often find great comfort from the love of people who support them unconditionally. His exit from the show, involving an extremely satisfying resolution to a plot thread that had been dangling for most of the series' run, was handled very well.

The exit of Redman's Pullman character was a little more sudden, however, and it was a little unsatisfying. It feels like she just sort of suddenly decided to move on, and her reasons for doing so just weren't really explored all that much; on top of that, I feel like it would be a much longer process for someone in the Metropolitan Police, particularly in a leadership position, to be able to move on, whereas she was pretty much just out the door and gone. Her replacement, Tamzin Outhwaite's Sasha Miller, seems like a solid character, though, and has already had some interesting things happening to her in just the two episodes I've seen her in so far.

Dennis Waterman's Gerry Standing, as the longest fixture in the series, is a great anchor point for the show. While his cheeky chappy Cockney act could have easily become a bit tiresome, he is shown throughout the series to be a character with some interesting depth and plenty of admirable qualities, even if he sometimes takes a somewhat laissez-faire approach to following the rules. Some of his interest comes from his three amicable divorces and the fact that all his ex-wives and children form one big extended family, but he also gets plenty of his own moments to shine.

The show isn't anything particularly revolutionary and I'm sure it's not regarded as a "classic" or anything, but it did successfully run for twelve series, which suggests it was doing something right along the way. I've enjoyed watching it so far, and I'm glad I took a chance on it; if you're after a detective show to spend some time with, you could do far worse.

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#oneaday Day 537: Old dogs

Since I've exhausted both Death in Paradise and its spin-off series Beyond Paradise for the moment, I was looking for a new "detective" show to watch. I considered the other Death in Paradise spinoff, Return to Paradise, but thought I fancied something a bit different. And BBC iPlayer was certainly keen to provide suggestions.

I settled on a show called New Tricks, which I hadn't heard of before, but which apparently first aired all the way back in 2003, and concluded its complete run in 2015. I've watched two episodes so far, and while it's a very different sort of show to Death in Paradise and Return to Paradise, I've enjoyed what I've seen so far.

New Tricks (at least initially) follows the semi-disgraced Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman) of the Metropolitan Police who, after a botched hostage rescue in which she shot a dog and the person she was supposed to be rescuing flung himself out of a window, paralysing himself when he landed on a car several storeys below, has been placed in charge of the fictional "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS. This is a branch of the Met specifically tasked with re-investigating unsolved "cold cases", with the officer in charge, initially Pullman, charged with wrangling a small group of retired former officers in the hope of their insights being able to put the various cases to bed once and for all.

Conceptually, it's a tad silly, particularly since the initial lineup of old men all initially appear to be somewhat comedic caricatures. There's Brian Lane (Alun Armstrong), who struggles with severe mental health issues and an obsession over the case that ended his career on the force; there's Jack Halford (James Bolam), who talks to his dead wife when no-one else is around, but is otherwise the most well-grounded of the bunch; and there's Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman, the only constant member of the cast throughout the entire run of the show), who is a bit of a geezer and a "naughty boy", in his words, with a string of failed marriages behind him and a somewhat unorthodox approach to following the rules. The characters are all introduced as each having their own sort of "thing" that defines them, but just the initial two episodes shows that there's clearly potential for some interesting character work going on.

What I've found quite fun about New Tricks so far is that it blends quite a few disparate elements and comes out feeling quite coherent. There's the obvious conflict between Pullman being a modern police officer (by 2003 standards, anyway) — and a woman, at that — and these retired former officers, all of whom are set in their ways to varying degrees. And then there's the friction between the private lives of all the characters and their professional responsibilities. The show is, on the whole, somewhat on the "gritty" side, with the struggles the various characters encounter all being somewhat realistic and relatable rather than the easily resolved fluff or material for comic relief that the Paradise series tended to favour, but there's also plenty of comedy inherent in the whole situation — particularly when Pullman shows herself to be the sort of woman who takes absolutely no shit from anyone.

The fact that the show premiered in 2003 with a 90-minute pilot before going into full production in 2004 is an interesting consideration, too. In some respects, the way the show is presented makes it clear it's from a different time — and while I try not to think of 2004 as being too much "of a different time" to right now, the fact is, it was over 20 years ago — and it's quite pleasant to return to that world. I'm not talking thematically or in terms of societal norms displayed in the show, obviously, but rather literally the way it is presented. It has a theme song, for Heaven's sake, and one sung by one of the cast members (Waterman), at that! What was the last show you watched that had a full-on theme song — and, more to the point, one that had been specifically composed to include the show's title as part of its lyrics?

Anyway, that's about all I want to say about it for the moment. I'm looking forward to getting to know the series a bit better. I'd actually never heard of it before, somehow, but I guess if it ran for twelve seasons, it must have had something to it, no?

Or, to put it another way: it's all right. It's okay!

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