'Vera', ITV

Is Vera a fair exchange for Laure? French television has recently taken delivery of ITV's Vera, whose fifth series opens here on Sunday (8pm). Can fans of the frowzy, seedy, rule-bending Parisian cops in Spiral (Engrenages to the home audience) find room in their hearts for the Northumbrian police inspector with her bag-lady fashion sense and initial grandmotherly aura - misleading, since she can freeze cheeky juniors with what used to be described as an old-fashioned look?

British fans need no introduction to Brenda Blethyn, an actress whose international career has been illuminated with dazzling flashes (and one or two filmic damp squibs), which makes one wonder why we take Vera so much for granted. Sunday's episode lacks the thespian knights and dames of much touted TV drama but is consistently better acted than, say, The Casual Vacancy. The grey northern landscapes combine bleakness and ravaged lyricism, the ensemble playing of the smallest performances are perfectly judged, and even the music is discreetly, impeccably, used.

A caravan and holiday-chalet park is a fairly typical Vera setting, picturesque nature deglamourised by the demands of small, dour lives. An explosion, a fire, a suspicious death: a tangled cast of characters bristles with secrets and guilt. Vera wades in, occasionally cryptic, her cards often close to that surprisingly unyielding chest, and slapping down uppity young officers. These are represented by her new DC - Ashworth has gone - whose name she takes pleasure in apparently forgetting (Kenny Doughty, with a nice line in the disconcerted). The plot gets knotty with last-minute twists that give the feeling of being piled on simply for complication's sake, but that is Vera giving value for money.

A solid Sunday-night mystery, without the interminable pointless prettiness of Montalbano, and a homegrown setting neither picture-postcard pretty nor self-dramatisingly sordid but a bit of both. A very British brand, in fact.

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