No slight on the home of Tintin and Jean-Claude Van Damme but seasons one and two of gangland thriller Hidden Assets (RTÉ One, Sunday, 9.30pm) became hugely tedious whenever the action flipped to Belgium, which it did a lot. But someone at Montrose has now had the inspired idea of shifting the action away from the unglamorous Low Countries to the much more evocative setting of the Basque heartland of Bilbao.
It’s a huge upgrade for a watchable, if thumpingly generic, crime drama that follows the adventures of a fictional unit of the Criminal Assets Bureau on the frontline of the fight against organised crime in Ireland and abroad. Bilbao enters the fray after Detective Claire Wallace (Nora-Jane Noone) and her team swoop on a dodgy accountant – only for him to blow his brains out in terror. He turns out to have a holiday home in Bilbao, where a local journalist has just been murdered after barking up the wrong tree.
Hidden Assets isn’t original and it isn’t particularly scintillating. But its workmanlike adherence to cop show cliches has an agreeably pulpy quality (it is also that rare RTÉ show that has done well internationally).
Less hysterical than the likes of Love Hate and Kin, it delivers what feels like a vaguely realistic picture of modern police work – where drilling into the bookkeeping practices of drug dealers is more useful than cornering them in a shoot-out. There is also an enjoyable cameo from The Stunning’s Steve Wall as a senior Garda, who walks around shouting his head off. Wall, who has a surprisingly high-profile career as an actor, hasn’t had this much fun since he played Christopher Walken’s bodyguard in the second Dune movie.
Hidden Assets review: Bilbao setting a welcome upgrade to this thumpingly generic crime drama
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As DS Wallace, Noone doesn’t have an awful lot to work with. She’s yet another phlegmatic cop who bottles up her feelings and believes emotions are best expressed with a clenched jaw and pursed lips. There is also a subplot involving racists picketing a local centre for asylum seekers in Dublin, which feels like it’s there just to be topical, and casts the protesters in a very unfavourable light.
Hidden Assets trundles along much as it has in previous seasons. It is that rarest of things – an RTÉ drama that is neither the best nor the worst thing ever. It is spectacularly, almost breathtakingly, average and on a random Sunday in November, that will do just fine.
