Traces: Forensics drama gets its fingers burnt with Line of Duty-style acronyms

Martin Compston finds himself in another crime drama where the acronym is king.

Line of Duty gave us an appetite for technical police speak — SIO, UCO, OCG, SCG — and the nitty-gritty of investigative work.

Extended scenes were dedicated to explaining procedure, regulations and case developments. Sequences on the lives of the investigating heroes, in contrast, were often silent and brief — Compston’s Steve Arnott looking pained and rubbing his dodgy back, for instance — a punctuation mark that didn’t necessarily elucidate.

Traces, on UKTV’s Alibi channel, deploys this formula to do for forensic science, and specifically the tiny world of forensic chemists with combustion expertise, what Line of Duty did for anti-corruption policing. Sadly it remains an unglamorous pursuit at the end of the first episode.

Part of the problem is those acronyms. The action centres on the labs at Sifa, the Scottish Institute of Forensic Science and Anatomy in Dundee, where a pair of experts, “fire maestro” Sarah Gordon (prolific Laura Fraser on perky form) and Kathy Torrance (icy Canadian Jennifer Spence) have developed Mooc. Don’t scoff, this is serious stuff: a “massive online open course” to teach students around the world. Not funny, then, but deadly dull.

Or is it? The episode opens with Emma Hedges (engaging Molly Windsor of Three Girls fame) arriving at the lab to start a job as a technician. She’s encouraged to do the Mooc, which turns out to be based on a fictional case that bears uncanny similarities to the unsolved murder of her mother. Emma’s seriously freaked out — and so is swot Sarah. Just how could she have allowed a really, really famous murder in wee Dundee to influence her thinking when she was developing the course?

There’s something else afoot in Dundee — a fire at Secrets nightclub which has left three people dead. Sarah’s called to a strategy meeting with the fire department and police. Lordy, it’s boring.

In Line of Duty, technical language is poetic, its rhythm knits with the beat of the action. Here details are listed unexotically. Probably important stuff, but forgettable. And the stuff is prosaic. A big deal is made about a rigged toaster loaded with cardboard, the source of the fire. Back in the lab, Sarah explains why a sticky label on the cardboard burned at a different rate. “People think fire destroys everything but it almost always leaves traces,” she says.

So what about Compston? Steve fans will be disappointed that his chipmunk cheeks don’t chew over acronyms in cockney. He’s back to his native Scottish and a non-professional potential rogue who becomes Emma’s love interest.