After probably three seasons too long – after the children Nazi agents parachuted into England season finale there was no coming back as far as I was concerned – Waking the Dead went quietly into that good TV night with a final success for the erratic, brilliant Boyd (Trevor Eve).

Most of the team went quietly into that good TV night along with it, but brilliant, erratic forensic scientist Eva Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald) scored herself her own TV show with The Body Farm.

If this was a US crime drama it would be a lot more glossy and glass and nobody would smoke. In fact, it would probably be Bones. Since it is UK, everything is shot in shades of grime, Eva Lockhart wears jeans and a waxed jacket and as much as I like Keith Allen, he’s no David Boreanaz. Perhaps it is cultural snobbery that I still think the show is more interesting.

Lockhart runs a state of the art body farm, studying the process of decomposition and ways to forensically examine it. Unfortunately, it turns out that no matter what your careers adviser at school told you – jobs in forensic science aren’t any more secure than working in the arts. The body farm has their funding cut and to make ends meet, Eva has to take a side job working for the acerbic DI Hale (Keith Allen)

Lockhart’s team – consisting of the empathic Rosa (Wunmi Mosaku), the handsome, possible love-interest Mike (Mark Bazeley) and Oggy ( Finlay Robertson) who appears to have issues somewhere on the autistic spectrum – aren’t too hapy about this invasion of real life into the hallowed halls of their academia. Particularly when their first case is an emotionally harrowing double homicide, one somehow involving the shattered family of a suicidal girl.

There is a lot of gore. When the bodies are found they have been shredded. Hale speculates that they were bomb-makers who’d made a mistake, but there were no shreds of clothing found in the…goo. The pale, deceptively gormless looking Oggy suggests that they might have been ‘subversive naturists.’

The crime, of course, is solved using clever science, cleverer scientists and some narrative chicanery to cover the weak spots. (The big reveal of the episode came when tsetse flies (apparently if one gets up your nose it will hurt) lead the team to a bloody bath-tub. One that they already knew was there.

The show was fun and interesting enough to justify me tuning in next week. That isn’t to say the show isn’t without its flaws, primarily the fact that the cast could have been sent from any generic CSI-lite show. Lockhart is the relentlessly logical lead scientist, Eva is the young, passionate and overly emotional one, Oggy is a genius with socialization problems, Mike is the one who looks puppy-eyed at people and Hale as foil, LeStrade to their Sherlocks.

It is one of the odd little quirks of genre literature, that trends come round and disappear again. The ratiocinative detective, solving crimes with only his mind, was prevalent in early literature from the period – a figure representing the interests of the dominant social classes – and was eventually superseded by the private dick, the cop for hire. Sherlock Holmes and the Continental Op. It is interesting to see the intellectually elite regain the top dog position, reflective of society too.

Meandering aside, even the stereotypes have promise. Oggy’s awkward science-geek persona is leavened by a gentle charm and innocence, captured most strongly in the easy relationship he has with Rosa. She doesn’t have some ‘magical’ understanding of Oggy, but the occasional awkwardness is what makes it believable. And while Rosa’s ‘I see the people, not just the science’ turn would get slow fast, it worked in this episode. Her earnest but uncomfortable relationship with the family of the suicidal girl was touching and effective.

Like I said, I’ll be tuning in next week.