A pathologist who talks to corpses, and a plot full of inexplicable holes: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews ITV's Winter

Winter (ITV1)

Rating:

We're all hypocrites, of course. We can't get enough of corpses, in cosy murder mysteries, on true-crime podcasts and in brutal noir detective serials.

But there's an unwritten rule that pathologists, the people who actually devote their career to dead bodies, must be weirdos.

'Brilliant but unconventional', as the ITV press release for Winter puts it. Or, to borrow the internet's favourite epithet (for reasons I'll explain): 'bat-**** crazy'.

Dr Ethan Winter, played by Richard Armitage, is the latest in a long line of eccentric mortuary medics, from Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta (recently played by Nicole Kidman) to Endeavour's creepy Dr DeBryn and the loopy Dr Fleur Perkins in Midsomer Murders.

But Winter takes eccentricity to a whole new plane – specifically, the spirit plane. 

He talks to his cadavers, introducing himself before beginning to dissect them, and inviting them to explain how they died.

'Anything else you want to tell me?' he asked one murder victim as he sewed her insides back up. 

She'd been filling his head with flashbacks, but duly complied with a morsel of physical evidence... a hair from the person who killed her.

Then he went home to his girlfriend, photojournalist Simone (Carlotta Banat), who turned out to be dead too. 

Her ghost was waiting with a glass of wine, and they shared a passionate boogie to the Pet Shop Boys' Always On My Mind (though Ann-Margret's disco hit Every Body Needs Some Body Sometimes might have been a better choice).

As a Bristolian, I really wanted to warm to this show, and I did thoroughly enjoy spotting locations around my home city. 

But the sheer number of plot holes, anomalies and contradictions became impossible to ignore.

Winter watched DI Lauren Bell (Annabel Scholey) quiz a suspect for the murder. The man's blood was found under the victim's fingernails. But he flatly denied killing her... so the police lost interest in him.

The rest of the story followed a hunt for a woman who went missing with her children after murdering her abusive husband. 

But since she'd neatly disposed of the body down a well with the help of her in-laws, she had no real reason to be hiding out in a cave.

More inexplicably still, when her five-year-old accidentally killed someone else, they didn't dump the second body in the well with the first. No, they broke into a refrigerator lorry and left it where it was bound to be discovered.

Winter cracked the case when he noticed the killer mum's father-in-law had a nasty cough. This made no sense to him, because the old boy's GP records showed he was vaccinated against flu (I'm not making this up).

Obviously, the cough could only be caused by exposure to droppings from rare American cave-dwelling bats that escaped from Bristol Zoo. Didn't I tell you it was literally you-know-what crazy?