A six-part series, which indulges in time-honoured traditions and energising twists, arrives just in time
At what point in the summer do you switch off your brain? When two thirds of the office has set their Slack to “away”? When your Instagram or TikTok feed is flooded with images of Capri? When the air becomes so still and dry that plans extend to “lie very still on a bed”? Let us call the end of July, as we teeter on the hazy days of August, a good time to save our year’s progress, log out and enter smooth brain mode.
Like all good crime stories, this takes place in a hard-to-reach countryside mansion owned by a haughty English family. Matilda and Oliver Anchor-Ferrers have just returned to Monmouthshire with their sulky, Kate Bush-aping, 20-something daughter, Lucia . It’s here, on a fine Saturday, that they encounter two policemen, Honey and Molina , here to investigate some weird goings-on on the anniversary of the brutal killing of two local teenagers, a cultish event known as “the Donkey Pitch murders”.
Still, there’s a lot of fun to be had here, largely thanks to some clever pacing and witty flourishes. Even when the budget limits are clear , the show has an admirable scrappiness, ushering in a retro pleasure with storylines about heart transplants, killers with a penchant for wearing gas masks, a chilling dance number or two. None of it is particularly new, but it’ll keep you watching late.
You can watch ‘Wolf’ on BBC1 on Mondays, and all six episodes are available to stream on iPlayer today