The first few minutes of new crime series Virdee are so pacy and adrenalised it feels like stumbling into a video game. 

And it’s all the more jarring when you realise we’re not in downtown Miami/Vegas/LA, but Bradford. 

However (with all due respect to the second-largest city in West Yorkshire), I guess just about anywhere urban can pᴀss for pretty much anywhere else urban when the camera’s moving at 100mph and it’s dark.

The show has been adapted from his own Bradford-set novels by Bradford-born pharmacist-turned-author AA Dhand, who grew up behind a local corner-shop counter and therefore knows his beat just as well as his protagonist, DCI Harry Virdee (Game Of Thrones’ Staz Nair). 

We meet Harry when he’s busy chasing a wrong ‘un through the mean streets, ending up on a railway line dodging an oncoming train. 

After that bit of business is successfully concluded he dusts himself off and starts to leave. 

The first few minutes of new crime series Virdee are so pacy and adrenalised it feels like stumbling into a video game

The show has been adapted from his own Bradford-set novels by Bradford-born pharmacist-turned-author AA Dhand, who grew up behind a local corner-shop counter and therefore knows his beat just as well as his protagonist, DCI Harry Virdee (Game Of Thrones’s Staz Nair, pictured)

We meet Harry when he’s busy chasing a wrong ‘un through the mean streets, ending up on a railway line dodging an oncoming train

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When a colleague asks, ‘Where the hell are you going?’ he chirpily replies, despite having nearly died, ‘Late for a wedding!’

This sort of eye-rolling dialogue is often an irony-laden default for modern crime drama. 

It was the breezy banter between the ᴀssᴀssins in Netflix’s recent (silly) Black Doves and it’s the tongue-in-cheek dialogue in every Guy Ritchie movie, ever. 

This schizoid split between the on-screen action and how characters respond is something Quentin Tarantino made his own – and which I suspect Gen X and Millennial fans-turned-screenwriters have unwittingly imitated ever since.

Happily, the attention-grabbing opener is the last time the dialogue is so implausible. Far from having appeared on screen via Reservoir Dogs, it turns out that DCI Harry Virdee is a thoroughly believable and intriguing Bradford copper; a Sikh estranged from his family after his marriage to a Muslim (medic Saima, with whom he has young son). 

When he finally arrives at that wedding the tensions between Harry and his family are revealed. And when Saima is confronted by one of Harry’s exes the dialogue explodes in a way that feels entirely credible.

Happily, the attention-grabbing opener is the last time the dialogue is so implausible. Far from having appeared on screen via Reservoir Dogs, it turns out that DCI Harry Virdee is a thoroughly believable and intriguing Bradford copper; a Sikh estranged from his family after his marriage to a Muslim (medic Saima, with whom he has young son)

When he finally arrives at that wedding the tensions between Harry and his family are revealed

This backstory of familial dysfunction and cultural schisms unfolds around more familiar crime-drama territory: Bradford’s drug gangs, a missing teenager, the near-cliché of the DCI acquiring an eager-beaver young DS (Danyal Ismail, one to watch), and Harry’s boss DS Clare Conway (Elizabeth Berrington, on fine pursed-lip form) always cracking the whip.

This six-parter feels timely and essential, a mainstream police procedural focused on Asian communities in the north of England clearly long overdue. 

Bradford, incidentally, is the UK’s 2025 City of Culture and the show held its premiere there last week. 

However, Virdee’s not merely a BBC box-ticker: by the time the first episode ends (as adrenalised as it began) we’re so invested in the outcomes that it feels perfectly judged. Virdee’s a hit not to miss.

Virdee airs on BBC One and can be streamed on BBC iPlayer.