Vincent

A crime drama following workaholic private detective Vincent Gallagher and his colleagues. Vincent and the team are soon faced with a death when a man asks them to find out if his wife is cheating on him.

Ray Winstone must possess the most unmistakeable voice on British television; he sounds as if he's spitting gravel into an empty biscuit tin. It's a fine voice, though we don't hear enough of it, thanks to the numerous pauses for dramatic effect in the first episode of this private-eye drama. Winstone is Vincent, a maverick with a complex personal life (his wife's left him because he's married to his job; no surprise there).

Vincent is so relentlessly determined to be noir-ish that it feels as if there's not much of a story. It spends most of its time with moody, lingering shots of Vincent (roaming around like a restless Honey Monster) and his team of gumshoes, including an attractive female sidekick (ex-Coronation Street star Suranne Jones). Winstone is, of course, the best thing about Vincent, a drama that burns so self-consciously slowly you may well despair of it catching light.

(review by Alison Graham, TV Editor, from Radio Times 'Choices' 10 October 2005)

From the Sunday Herald, 15 October 2006. Preview by Damien Love:

The new series of Vincent is equally strong. Ray Winstone, of course, plays the eponymous private eye, drifting London like a grumbling storm cloud. He’s backed by a dizzyingly strong team – Surrane Jones, Ian Puleston-Davies, a deeply strange Joe Absolom. But it’s Winstone’s show. He lends it an unreconstructed strength. Vincent taps the stuff that made The Sweeney an institution, and has enough humour and nous that it doesn’t need to caricature it. It’s superb. I was almost punching the air by the end of the first episode; the only drawback is there are only three more this series. Here’s to another 15 years of it.

According to ContactMusic.com, Ray found it hard to watch his daughter Jaime's scene in Vincent where she has her throat cut.

Manchester Evening News has an interview with Ray about why Vincent is shot in Manchester and how Jaime got her role in the drama.

Nice review of Vincent by Carol Midgley in The Times 17 October 2006: Vincent (ITV1) stars Ray Winstone and as the dog’s b******s of British acting he is always worth a look given that he can lift even the dodgiest script to semi-Bafta level. In fact a TV critic could almost get away with not watching anything he is in, merely writing “Ray Winstone was brilliant in . . . (fill in title of programme)” and going back to sleep.

Nice review of the second episode of the second series of Vincent in The Scotsman here.