A TV detective was celebrating today, after finding incriminating evidence about a crime on his first watch of newly acquired CCTV footage, without having to stand in the background and then suddenly shout 'Wait! There! Rewind that bit!'.
DCI Mike McBride, the downtrodden lead investigator in the popular police/forensic pathology procedural 'Talking Stiffs', broke with all conventions by immediately spotting his prime suspect smashing a hammer into the head of the victim just 5 seconds into watching some crystal clear colour footage.
'There you go. Bam! Oh, that's got to hurt!', said a delighted McBride. 'And look, what's that, just as he's cocking his head helpfully towards the camera? Is he pulling his wallet out of his pocket? You can see his driving licence with his photo and address on it. That's got to be helpful for us to build a case against him'.
'We were expecting an all nighter', said Rachel Jones, an overworked but incisive and clever sergeant. 'I'd spent the first half of the episode trying to obtain the footage and usually, I'd expect to be endlessly playing it through, getting more and more frustrated at the lack of evidence, and being constantly passed over for promotion, until I'm asked at midnight to just look through it again for a final time, just as McBride is about to head home to his empty flat with just a bottle of whiskey and some jazz music for company.'
'The whole team would gather round my computer, and then the boss would - from 10 metres away - spot a car in the background that we'd missed before, and I'd zoom in and work out a couple of the letters on the number plate.' continued Jones. 'We'd all spill our coffees and leg it over to the suspect's house while Mcbride hollers that all leave is cancelled for the forseeable future' But no, it's case closed and we're only just at the first ad break'.
In the next episode, McBride is surprised when a helpful pathologist provides all the important forensics on a victim in a neat folder on his desk within a couple of hours of the post-mortem. The case is solved within 10 minutes after a key witness then reveals everything she knows about the murderer in the first interview, including all those bits of information that she didn't think were important at all but which turn out to be crucial.
