One of the more distracting things about Games of Thrones - ASIDE from the gratuitous inclusion of bouncing tits at every possible juncture - is the number of semi-forgotten British actors who crop up in supporting roles. Barely an episode goes by without an appearance by that guy who used to be in that thing, or what's-his-name from thingummy. I'm giving it one more series until Jimmy Nail turns up.
A crocodile shoe, the feared banner of Ser Spender of Tyne.
One of the more startling moments for fans of the series is looking up the actor playing the sarcastic mercenary knight Bronn, only to realise that it is in fact half of mid-nineties pop duo Robson and Jerome. The half that doesn't currently have a fishing show.
With Jerome Flynn suddenly famous again, the BBC were quick to cast him in new drama Ripper Street, and apparently they weren't the only people to find one of the craggy, aging knights from the land of Westeros to front TV series.
Step forward Iain Glenn, the artist formerly known as Ser Jorah Mormont.
The spell check keeps insisting that this is Norah Mormont, which gives me an idea for an amusing spin off...
Glenn has been cast as Jack Taylor in an adaptation of the novels by Ken Bryan. Taylor is a Galway-based private detective who is, if this series is anything to go by, the most cliched character in the world.
Taylor is an ex-cop who has been drummed out of the force for breaking the rules, and has a drink problem. He is contracted by a mysterious woman to find her missing daughter, with the help of his crazy sidekick who might not be trustworthy.
On the upside, my next destination for a crime spree is probably going to be Ireland, because, if this show is anything to go by, the police there are terminally stupid. A string of young girls turn up dead on the same stretch of beach, and nobody except Drunken Mormont, P.I. is suspicious. It later transpires that the killer has been offing these girls in bath tub and dumping the bodies, implying that Irish pathologists don't ever think to check the lungs of drowning victims to see if they were full of suspiciously clean, Imperial Leather scented water.
Luckily, with Jack Taylor on the case, there will be justice for all. Albeit at an excruciatingly slow pace. Five minutes after he is introduced, Taylor's crazy sidekick mentions that he misses his time as a paratrooper because he liked the killing so much, but it takes Taylor another hour or so to suspect his friend might not be on the level. The dialogue aims for hardboiled noir, but instead comes off as pretentious leaden and amateurish, like Father Ted attempting to solve a crime, only way less fun. At one point, after a drinking binge, Taylor wakes up with a priest standing over him and actually utters the line "Father Malachy! ...What... Where... How long was I out?!"
Say that line to yourself and try to find a way to make it not sound ridiculous, and you'll soon see what Iain Glenn is up against as an actor.
The plot is a mix of the thuddingly predictable and unfailingly nonsensical - at one point, Taylor leaves a murder suspect who has already threatened to kill him with the corpse he has just finished torturing to death, and goes to have an angry confrontation with the femme fatale he's shagging instead of doing something sensible like calling the police. When the bad guy is finally shot (in the back, by the love interest, just before he can kill Taylor, because there is literally nothing original going on here) Jack's former police colleagues arrive, kick the body into the sea and cover the whole thing up for apparently no reason.
I haven't read the source novels, and it's possible that this series is doing them a grave disservice, but it's worth pointing out that another popular literary crime fighter, Jack Reacher, has now descended into cliché. The Reacher novels started in 1997, and author Lee Child said that Reacher was designed as an antidote to all the burned out, alcoholic ex-cops who were clogging up the genre. Ken Bryan started the Taylor series three years later in 2000, and is apparently content to continue clogging indefinitely. Jack Taylor is such a stereotype that characters invented to combat this lazy archetype have themselves now become stale.
It's a shame to see Iain Glenn, a decent actor with both charm and gravitas, wasted in such hacky material, but there's very little to recommend Jack Taylor. We'll just have to wait until someone else from Game of Thrones gets a detective series. Let's face it, who doesn't want a sarcastic midget P.I.?!
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