Silent Witness series 25, episode 1 review: Amanda Burton brings the show back to life

“Take your time, the body’s going nowhere.” Those were the first words spoken by pathologist Sam Ryan in the first episode of Silent Witness (BBC One) back in February 1996. And she was right, the bodies have gone nowhere – the pungent parade of cadavers have amassed 212 episodes across 24 series in 26 years. Even when Ryan (Amanda Burton) left the Lyell Centre in series eight, the bodies went nowhere – more than 7 million of us still tune in for Stiff of the Week. Emilia Fox replaced Burton and even though she has racked up 166 episodes to Burton’s 54, it is still Sam Ryan who is synonymous with Silent Witness, rather than Nikki Alexander.

The writers, to their credit, allowed Fox and Burton to play with this tension as they finally came face to face. While it was all smiles and winks to the camera at first – “Good to finally meet you, Nikki. You’ve done excellent work at the Lyell.” “Oh, we just built on your foundations…” – the pair were soon butting heads over a corpse as Ryan indulged in a spot of backseat pathology. That lab ain’t big enough for the both of them.

Ryan is now a private medicine bigwig, involved in a government scheme to roll out controversial “medical passports”, which gets the health secretary and her husband shot by a sniper. It isn’t untypical of shows like this to put the suspicion on anyone and everyone, but it was particularly piquant that Ryan herself, shifty and meddling, became a person of interest in the viewers’ eyes.

This, however, also brought into sharp relief the fundamental problem with Silent Witness – Ryan was always a more compelling character than Alexander, who, though they often load her up with personal problems, is a straightforward heroine. Now, Ryan is back, and more nuanced than ever, up to her eyeballs in morally murky dealings with Big Tech that could impinge on our civil liberties and playing No 10 off against the police. Alexander, meanwhile, might finally sleep with her hunky colleague.

But what do we expect? This is a show where huge breakthroughs in investigations come via characters listlessly looking at CCTV footage and saying: “Wait… Stop. Rewind a bit. There. Can you zoom in on that? There. Do you see that?” Let’s just enjoy Burton while she’s back and, just maybe, while she’s bad.