Professor T
Rating: 
Baptiste
Rating: 
The strangely named Detective Inspector Rabbit was not a happy man. He’d been sidelined, insulted and upstaged by an eccentric amateur who was being proved right about everything.
That sort of humiliation has been happening to world-weary coppers since the days of Sherlock Holmes.
It’s a grand tradition, which didn’t make DI Rabbit (Andy Gathergood) feel any better on the debut of Professor T (ITV).
‘This is bullocks,’ he muttered (or words to that effect). A dangerous thing for any character to remark in a new show. An unkind reviewer might take it out of context.
Ben Miller, best-known as the uptight DI Poole on Death In Paradise, is convincingly testy as a criminology lecturer at Cambridge University
Unkind and unfair, because Professor T is not a bad show. It’s derivative and predictable, slow and old-fashioned, but none of that makes it unwatchable.
Whether we overlook its faults depends on the cast. Ben Miller, best-known as the uptight DI Poole on Death In Paradise, is convincingly testy as a criminology lecturer at Cambridge University.
Ex-student Lisa Donckers, now a Detective Sergeant (Emma Naomi), ropes him into her investigation of a series of rapes on campus. He’s reluctant, but agrees to help because he carries a torch for her boss — his old girlfriend (Juliet Aubrey).
The show is a remake of a Belgian original, which partly explains why it feels dated. That’s exacerbated by the university setting, echoing Morse, Grantchester and a stack of others.
Professor Jasper Tempest doesn’t listen to opera or drive a vintage car (though he probably will, given time). He prefers to solve cases by sitting on the roof and gazing out across the spires.
