Forever, Sky 1, TV review: 'Every time he dies, he disappears then emerges, fully grown and naked'

City medical examiner Dr Henry Morgan (the Welsh Ioan Gruffudd doing an English accent) also happens to be immortal

Ioan Gruffudd in 'Forever'

There was cod history of a more entertaining kind in Forever on Sky 1. This New York-set crime procedural would be a procedural like any other, were it not for one supernatural proviso: City medical examiner Dr Henry Morgan (the Welsh Ioan Gruffudd doing an English accent) also happens to be immortal.

Every time he dies, he disappears then emerges, fully grown and naked, from a nearby body of water. Don’t ask me how he makes it home without getting arrested.

In the weaker episodes, this backstory is barely mentioned and Forever is a sub-Sherlock series in which a too-clever-by-half English eccentric outwits his plodding NYPD colleagues. In the better episodes, like last night’s, Henry’s extra-long life is both central to the plot and a source of enjoyable light comedy.

“Oh, I gave up opiates years ago,” was his offhand response when approached by a scary-looking drug dealer in Alphabet City. We didn’t get to see him kicking back in a 19th-century opium den, but we did get flashbacks to London in 1888, where Henry was the medical examiner at the scene of a Jack the Ripper murder. It’s all nonsense, of course, but nonsense made lovable by a cast that includes not only the charming Gruffud, but cuddly Judd Hirsch as his antique-dealing confidant Abe.