A Monday night dilemma over totty or a timelord

It seems as if TV drama is all about solving gruesome murders these days, but Antonia Quirke is more interested in the leading men

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 6, 2009

In the first episodes of the two new police dramas currently going head-to-head on Monday nights, a woman bled to death in a school playground as midnight tolled, a Ugandan immigrant was hooked by his feet to a ceiling fan and beaten with a hammer, and a racist drowned in a bowl of urine. These weren't the interesting bits. May I instead draw your attention to the programmes' two stars:

Exhibit A: Rupert Penry-Jones, aged 39, born London, one-time boyfriend of Kylie Minogue, and last seen as Richard Hannay in The Thirty Nine Steps over Christmas.

Rupert Penry-Jones: totty in a very American sense

Rupert Penry Jones Whitechapel 39 Steps Spooks

In Whitechapel (ITV 9pm Mondays) he plays a priggish and ambitious DI being fast-tracked to the top by the guy who played Prince Charles in The Queen.

The programme opened with Penry-Jones in black tie at the club. Rupert does a good line in pretending he went to Eton (he didn't - Dulwich College) and is often cast as a snotty type who helps lesser mortals along with their subjunctives. An ex-model, he also projects the slightly foppish put-me-in-a-gold-paisley-tie fashion sense of Edward VIIIth. Having said that, in the series Spooks, in which he was the much lusted-after action hero, he was frequently called on to dither over relationships – a dead wife, a colleague with a crush – but you can't really imagine Rupert losing his mind over a woman.

He gives the impression that love is a mere dissipation of energy. In Whitechapel – in which his character must rootle out a Jack the Ripper copycat killer – Penry-Jones is elevated to the level of something not quite seen before on British television. He is openly cast as the totty in a very American sense. In one scene a female doctor makes a big display of ogling him - this woman's jaw is on the floor. In response, Penry-Jones stalks down a hospital corridor oozing the scorn of the too-often admired. It called to mind Brad Pitt's comment that he often feels like a woman being harassed by construction workers.

At times he is more creature than human, and the cast scuttle behind him

Throughout the programme, Penry-Jones is repeatedly filmed reflected in windows or looking at himself in mirrors, as though checking to see he's still there. Like all beauties he can look almost peculiar from some angles – more creature than human. The other members of the cast scuttle behind him, apparently tiny, deliberately dressed in shabby greys and washed-out blues.

Much is made in the actual plot of their bad breath and receding hair, their spare tyres wobbling under too-small M&S bomber jackets. Even London itself seems below par and grubby, shot as it is through a lens the municipal grey-green of a 1930's tea-cup.
And in the middle Penry-Jones, the great sexual product of British