And so to Darnell College, Cambridge, where the spires are perfectly dreaming, but nothing else is quite right. “Hello, Master!” calls Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall), a postgraduate student of mathematics who looks like a Calvin Klein underwear model, to James Alderman (Stephen Rea), the predictably twitchy and eccentric professor who runs his college. Hmm. Such a nomenclature is surely one no 21st-century person would ever use. He might as well have shouted: “Hello, chief boffin!” or “Hail, our well-read leader!” But then, our hero is supposed to be a genius. Such people, as portrayed on screen, are not permitted to be like the rest of us. They must be rude, arrogant weirdos who struggle to meet the eyes of others and ruin good tablecloths by writing long strings of equations on them.
Prime Target: you’ll see now what writer Steve Thompson (Jericho, Vienna Blood) is doing with his title. Brooks’s passion for prime numbers is about to get him into all sorts of trouble, and not only with Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen) whose white table runner quickly starts to look like the Dead Sea Scrolls when he’s invited over to dinner by her husband, his supervisor Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey). When Brooks talks excitedly of possible sequences of prime numbers as “God’s cipher… the DNA of existence”, Mallinder is furious. This is “a unicorn”, the stuff of the “tin-foil-hat mob” – a response that sounded, to my ears, fair enough. I have a sister who’s a mathematician, and if she started on about God’s cipher over the spaghetti, I would suggest a little lie-down. But then Mallinder burns the table runner, and you start to wonder what he’s really worried about. On thing’s for sure: it’s not the academic league tables.
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