Not even drama on the streets of Belfast could drum Mirren off the top spot as Prime Suspect returned better than ever

Let's just get it over with, shall we? Prime Suspect: The Last Witness was the very rarest sort of television, the kind that makes a critic feel justified in spending the bulk of her working life welded to an armchair, toting a remote control.
Week after week there is still far more good stuff on television than you might imagine but, obviously, there is a great deal less that is truly great - just as well, really, because spouting a geyser of hot praise does not become a critic. I can, for example, rustle you up at least four virtually unqualified 'brilliant's in relation to Prime Suspect (for the acting, directing, writing, photography) but where's the fun in that? Like the family silver, the usual adjectival suspects tarnish very quickly, even if you only need to get them out once or twice a year. Mine have remained unpolished since State of Play.
Despite being the cliche standard-bearer, Helen Mirren continues to make Det Supt Jane Tennison so much more than just a crisply effi cient copper sacrificing her private life for her work. With the consummate film actor's ability to register complex emotions by the subtlest facial recalibrations, Mirren appears to act at a sort of subatomic level. And the older she gets, the better she does it.
A wrinkle will always be the enemy of actresses who seek to hide behind a character rather than reveal themselves within one, but that's not Mirren's style. Wrinkles are a part of her emotional arsenal. She looks great but, more importantly, she looks real, and this level of humanity seems to rub off on the performances of those around her.
Prime Suspect gave us glorious support from, among others, Frank Finlay as Tennison's father, Robert Pugh as Tennison's old-school, rozzer-by-numbers subordinate DS Simms, Ingeborga Dapkunaite as the troubled illegal immigrant Jasmina Blekic, and Velibor Topic as her killer, Duscan Zigic (who, rather against the odds, managed to elicit something approaching sympathy from the viewer despite the fact that his dialogue could have fitted on to one sheet of A4). And perhaps finest of all was Phoebe Nichols as a chillingly callous and superior spook. She had a very classy speech (in which she told Tennison to back off from her investigation of a suspected Bosnian war criminal because he was under the protection of the British Government) the delivery of which made her subsequent comeuppance even more emotionally satisying.
If there was a weak link (and I'm really fishing here) it was Oleg Menshikov's Milan Lukic, the baddest of baddies, whose psychopathic charm offensive ensured he eventually came across like a panto villain. The denouement, in which he held a knife to the throat of his wife's small daughter, was unnecessarily heavy-handed, but this is a minor quibble. Prime Suspect was one of the most worthwhile TV experiences of the year and Mirren is, basically, a goddess.