CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Minus 38 degrees, 8ft snow drifts – perfect for cold-blooded murder
Cardinal
Bradley Walsh: Happy 60th Birthday
Rating: 
Revenge is sweet, says the old English proverb, and it is also a dish best served cold.
Which just goes to show proverbs should never be taken too literally — you could set out for revenge, and end up with ice cream.
No place could be better suited for settling scores than Algonquin Bay in Canada’s frozen wastes, the setting for the murder thriller Cardinal (BBC2), where it’s 38 degrees below freezing at night.
Fans of the perpetually despondent detective John Cardinal (Billy Campbell) are used to seeing him on BBC4, usually investigating serial killers in the summer when the woods are full of midges, grizzly bears and ancient Native American spirits. But as the homicide officer switches to a bigger audience on BBC2, mountains of snow are piled up 8ft high at the roadsides and there’s a booming local trade in stolen snowmobiles.
Fans of the perpetually despondent detective John Cardinal are used to seeing him investigating serial killers in the summer. He is pictured with his Cardinal co-star Karine Vanasse as Det. Lise Delorme
It’s so chilly, the police officers wear thermal underwear and snoods around the station. That makes for a cooling antidote to the warmest spring on record.
Cardinal is even having sub-zero nightmares. In this series, which opened with a double episode and is now available in full on iPlayer, he is tormented by dreams of children trapped inside a car that is stranded on a frozen lake.
He wants to save them, but he is wading through snow drifts. How much worse it could be, though, if this was one of those nightmares where you look down and realise you’re wearing no trousers. Think of the frostbite.
That’s Cardinal’s problem. The atmosphere is so bleak, dark and bitter that it verges on the unintentionally comical. Compared to Algonquin Bay, the murder-strewn backlands of Scandinavian serials such as Wallander and The Killing are an amusement arcade.
Bradley Walsh is clearly a long way off retirement
The first victim this time was a politician’s husband, found chained to a log and frozen solid on his knees, howling at the moon.
The second is a little old lady who grows orchids and feeds the birds — dragged off her mobility scooter and tied up in an icebound scrapyard.
Meanwhile, Cardinal’s wife has killed herself, his daughter has moved out, his partner Lise Delorme (Karine Vanasse) has applied for a transfer and he’s living in a bedsit. Don’t bother trying to whistle a happy tune — the notes will freeze solid in the air.
The crown prince of whistling happy tunes is Watford lad Bradley Walsh, a star so chirpy he probably lives on birdseed and sleeps on a perch.
Give him a cuttlefish and he’d sharpen his beak on it.
The human budgie was the subject of a fawning celebration that hailed every stage of his career from stand-up club comic to old-fashioned crooner, on Bradley Walsh: Happy 60th Birthday (ITV). He’s an all-round entertainer, there’s no doubt about that. Right now he’s best known for presenting The Chase, but in the past he’s been a successful TV actor — as roguish Danny Baldwin in Coronation Street and DS Ronnie Brooks in Law & Order.
Bizarrely, he also plays one of the companions in BBC1’s Doctor Who with Jodie Whitaker, though not even Bradley could claim that has been an unqualified success.
Clips from ancient gameshows such as Midas Touch and You Must Be Joking confirmed that he models his style on telly’s original all-rounder, Bruce Forsyth. There’s the same self-confident strut and the exaggerated despair when contestants make a muck of things.
ITV adores him, and will smother him with compliments if that’s what it takes to keep him. They shouldn’t worry. Whatever new twists Bradley is planning, retirement doesn’t look like one of them.