See more Daily Mail on Google - save us as a Preferred SourceBy CHRISTOPHER STEVENS, TV CRITIC Published: 00:01 BST, 3 June 2026 | Updated: 00:01 BST, 3 June 2026
The Fortune (Channel 5) Rating: Four out of five starsA plea to TV writers: if you're worried the opening of your thriller isn't strong enough, change it. Don't cheat by starting with a glimpse of the ending.Russell T. Davies did it on Sunday night with Tip Toe on Ch4, showing us a body hanging from a lamppost on a Manchester street before flashing up a caption that read, 'Ten days earlier'.The same trick was played at the start of The Fortune, as a shadowy figure crept onto a boat moored at the dockside and, aiming a pistol with a silencer at another shadowy figure, pulled the trigger.Then we spiralled back to the real beginning of the story — which was, in fact, a more original and interesting set-up. Fraught businessman Denis Lawson kissed his wife and son goodbye, before setting off to a hotel . . . where he unpacked his suitcase, checked his phone, ran a bath and blew his brains out.To lose an actor of Lawson's quality in the first five minutes is a blow, but The Fortune has an exceptional cast. It includes Rebecca Front (of whom we haven't seen enough recently) and Callum Woodhouse as the bereaved wife and son, Nina Wadia as a shady solicitor, and Stephen Tompkinson, who turns up at the end of the first episode as a terrifying taxi driver. Pictured: Eleanor Tomlinson as Amanda Blakefield in The Fortune Pictured: Callum Woodhouse as Anthony WorrallThe main star, though, is Eleanor Tomlinson as Amanda, a married mum working as a waitress in a restaurant where her husband, Jimmy (Matthew Lewis), is the chef.Publishers have a fancy term for thrillers like The Fortune. They talk about the 'high-concept' genre. BRUTAL INSULT OF THE NIGHT 'Jamie Vardy is Leicester City's greatest-ever player,' declared the voiceover in the opening seconds of the new reality show The Vardys (ITV1). Well, that's two fingers to another Foxes striker ... a lad called Lineker. I thought ITV liked you, Gary? To the rest of us, they're just stories that make us ask, 'What if that happened to me?'In the middle of a busy shift, Amanda is staggered to learn a complete stranger (Lawson, of course) has left her a country house, 50 acres of land and a couple of million quid in cash.Amanda's first reaction is to turn it down flat. But it's not that easy, and she starts to drive herself frantic wondering why some man she doesn't know has been dying, literally, to make her rich.Her first thought is that he might be her birth father. But she learns nothing from a visit to a dementia care home to see her mother (Paula Wilcox — told you the cast was something special).The Fortune is set in the striking seaside town of Hartlepool. The last crime drama to be filmed here was The Thief, His Wife And The Canoe, which starred Eddie Marsan as the real-life insurance fraudster John Darwin, who faked his own death.Reviewing that in 2022, I made the heinously embarrassing mistake of muddling up two north-east towns beginning with H-A-R...and called it Harrogate.My postbag overflowed with caustic rebukes for weeks. 'You total imbecile' was one of the kinder jibes. To anyone tempted to write and remind me — yes, I know, sorry.
