DVDs in Review

Wire in the Blood - The Complete Box Set

Title: Wire in the Blood - The Complete Box Set

Release date: November 30 2009

Certificate: 18

Format: DVD

DVD RRP: £69.99

Rating: 4/5

The "gritty Great British crime thriller" has become so much of a cliché that it is seldom seen as a gritty or all that great, but 'Wire in the Blood' is an exception - it provides gritty detail, it's very British (set in the north of England instead of the usual London), it contains well-written crime scenes and it's certainly thrilling.

It ticks all the boxes and so does this DVD collection from Revelation. Spread across 14 discs and amounting to nearly 2,000 minutes of entertainment, this box set is a must have for crime lovers.

It collects all six seasons as well as the spin off film set in Texas of all places, 'Prayer of the Bone' from 2008, which was filmed presumably in an attempt to push the series to an American market. There's no need - the success of this series on its home turf needs no further action.

Robson Green puts his singing days behind him to take on one of his darkest roles as Dr Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist with problems of his own - a role brilliantly crafted by Scottish crime writing goddess Val McDermid.

Hill is teamed with a (refreshingly) tough female cop (who is played by Hermione Norris and then later by Simone Lahbib), but it's Hill's show through and through. His social skills are so stilted that it's easy to compare him with the sociopaths that inhabit his cases, much like Tony Soprano in 'The Sopranos' breaks his own code of silence by discussing his mafia related woes with a psychiatrist.

It's this interesting, and increasingly narrow, divide between two worlds that makes the series what it is. It's a shame that 'Wire in the Blood' doesn't examine this as deeply as it could, but it's still a cracking crime series that deserves to be remembered now that it's gone. This DVD box set is the perfect method.