The Body Farm

On TV: Tuesday 13th September 2011

Channel: BBC One 9pm

Episode Type: 1/6

In 1 Sentence: New crime drama which didn’t live up to expectations

The Body Farm

BBC Summary: Eve Lockhart runs forensic research facility 'The Body Farm', studying the complex journey the body goes through as it decays.

Eve and her team of scientists quickly discover that dealing with victims of crime is a lot messier than any of them expect.

It was this very trailer that persuaded me to watch in the first place - what a fantastic trailer!

My Review: Tara Fitzgerald stars as Dr Eve Lockhart, who was apparently in Waking the Dead, a successful BBC crime series. As someone you hadn’t seen Waking the Dead, or indeed any other BBC crime/mystery show, I was interested to see what The Body Farm is all about. 

It was actually not bad, not brilliant, not gripping, interesting and dark all the same. As a lover of dark drama it wasn’t as ‘grown-up’ as I was expecting. It was a bit too ‘soap opera’ for me at times. There seems to be a story-per-episode policy, which I’m not too keen on. I’m hoping some good, strong plot threads will develop in episode 2 that will keep me wanting to watch the rest of the series - a relationship between Mike and Eve for instance, else I’ll be tempted to turn off. 

I have to be honest and say that when I settled down to watch this over breakfast I had to turn off a few minutes in and come back to it later. It is pretty gory with rotting corpses galore, complete with maggots and flesh flies. The main story in the first episode was a little too predictable for my liking and I would have preferred more time getting to know the team as characters than the guest stars. At the moment I couldn’t care less about any of the regulars as they haven’t really taken the time to establish them. 

Also I must add that the whole thing is wildly unrealistic. Why were there no police involved in a crime scene? Do scientists usually do all the detecting with not a police officer or procedure in sight? That just made it harder to like, but I will give the second episode a go and give it one more chance. Otherwise I’m switching off...

Score: 7/10