Smash-Up Reveals Corporate Evil, Murder By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg)— Sometimes it pays to take the bus. That’s one interpretation of “Collision,” a deeply captivating drama airing on PBS Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time. The story, written by Anthony Horowitz and Michael A. Walker, unfolds from a pile-up on England’s A12, in which two people are killed and several others injured. On the inanimate side, a Mercedes, BMW and Volvo go toes-up, along with a couple of junkers. The larger story, however, is that you never know who you might bump into on the highway. In this case, the dead and wounded include a piano teacher with a mysterious fetish, a desperate smuggler, a guy who might have bumped off his mother-in-law, a middle-aged rich guy with a roving eye, a nervous whistle-blower, and a couple of stoners being chased for speeding. A representative cross-section of humanity, no doubt. Detective Inspector John Tolin (Douglas Henshall), himself a haunted obsessive, is brought in to find out why the wreck occurred. He’s teamed with Senior Investigating Officer Ann Stallwood (Kate Ashfield), with whom he had an affair that ended badly. When these two are together there’s no need to run the air conditioner. They radiate permafrost. Yet Tolin has a warm nose for rot, which serves him well. The deeper he looks into the mayhem, the murkier it gets – and the deeper we’re drawn in. There’s a decidedly realistic air about the production. Tolin works out of narrow office with cheap wood paneling and one wall painted a sickly yellow. Like many real-life inspectors he’s none too flashy; indeed, it looks like he might comb his hair with a pork chop. Stallwood, meantime, is a bowling-alley blonde who’s not going to make you forget the babes who conduct most cinematic investigations. But she’s a solid type and one can’t help but wonder if she’s going to eventually warm toward Tolin, who lost his wife in an accident that also crippled his daughter. Fear not: there is one true babe -- Alice Jackson (Lenora Crichlow), who unfortunately is one of the deceased, though she looks good even post-mortem. Her father alleges she and boyfriend Gareth Clay (Anwar Lynch) were singled out for chase because they were black. It turns out they were roaring along at 83 miles per hour and engaged in another illegal activity as well. Yet they are, by comparison, the innocent ones. The body count rises as the investigation proceeds, and Tolin begins unearthing signs of international corporate evil and perhaps murder. Several questions are left to be resolved in film’s conclusion, which airs Nov. 22. Among them: Why didn’t Danny Rampton (Dean Lennox Kelly), a smuggler who abandoned his vehicle after the crash, at least tip police as to the nature of his cargo? Why did Karen Donnelly (Claire Rushbrook), who made copies of her boss’s computer files to give to a journalist, check herself out of the hospital after the wreck, and who were those people following her in the black Mercedes? Why did Brian Edwards (Phil Davis), who was taking a drive with his mother-in-law (Sylvia Syms), say she didn’t have on a seatbelt when she really did – and were her head wounds really the result of the wreck? Why is Richard Reeves (Paul McGann), a wealthy middle-aged developer, chasing a twenty-something waitress? Okay, we know the answer to that one, though we’ll have to wait and see if his lust is in vain. And what exactly is piano teacher Sidney Norris’s (David Bamber) fetish? Viewers weary of blood and guts will find little here to offend them. These cars crash without exploding in flames and the few corpses don’t look nearly as bad as some people you might bump into while walking the streets. The first night ends with another body rolling out of the wreckage, though we’re not positive he’s without pulse, or how he ties into the larger picture. Another reason to catch the second act. Meantime, keep your eyes on the road. (Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
