Carl Jones: Glum, grey, grim - it's why we love our TV cops

I know our most popular small-screen sleuths have never exactly been party animals, and tend to be a tad on the tetchy side, but back in the days of Columbo, Poirot, Kojak, Frost, and even Inspector Morse, there was always a light-hearted comedy touch lurking behind their eccentricities, however unpleasant the crime at hand.

These days, though, it seems to be just unremitting gloom. Luther, Broadchurch, and now DCI Banks . . . come on guys, give us a break from the monochrome misery.

If you dissect popular culture in modern-day Britain, it's become crammed with just as much horror, gore and crime as we saw in Victorian times.

Take ITV's Broadchurch, for example. The subject matter – neighbourhood paedophile murders innocent young schoolboy and dumps his body on the beach – couldn't get much darker, yet we lapped up the rollercoaster seediness, suspense and suspicion and turned it into one of ITV's biggest successes in recent times.

Meanwhile, over on the Beeb, there's Idris Elba as Luther. Terrified households were left anxiously checking under their beds before switching off the lights for weeks after the last series. I know at least two people who now sleep with the landing light on, as a direct result of watching the programme which seemed to delight in seeing viewers recoil in horror.

And now we have DCI Banks, the eternally tormented cop from the pages of Peter Robinson's celebrated novels, who's back for a third series.

The main man, played by that national treasure of an actor Stephen Tompkinson, might lack the muscular grit and visceral edge of Luther, but he's still a harsh and difficult chap to warm to. A bloke you'd struggle to make chit-chat with in the pub for very long.

Aside from dishing out burgers at a barbecue at the start of series three and having five or six too many on a work night, Banks cuts a bleak, grey character in a world of grotty council estates and seedy arcades.

He's a brooding enigma of a man, full of pent-up frustration, plying his trade in a Yorkshire village which is as far removed from the chocolate box Heartbeat image as it's possible to get.

And viewers just can't get enough of it.

When you boil it all down, however, there's nothing remotely innovative in the Banks formula.

Like most of his modern day contemporaries, he's playing pretty much detective drama by numbers. Maverick leading character with a troubled personal life, check; glamorous female sidekick who finds her boss strangely attractive, check; and line managers who consider their man's methods infuriatingly irregular. Yep, that's present and correct too.

And yet the programme has a certain something, a realism, an honesty, which makes it connect to our modern world.

So what conclusion should we reach from this? That we're so insular and suspicious these days that we think this is what life's really like?

We certainly do love a good murder, that's for sure. And when it comes to writing about very screwed up detectives dedicated to solving the case at the risk of all else, and the expense of anything resembling a personal life, nobody does it better than us Brits.