I would watch Silent Witness for another 30 years – it’s still the best ...Middle East

Fashions in crime drama come and go. Not so very long ago, “noir” was all the rage, whether Scandi or otherwise. Now you can’t move for cosy crime, a trend that is threatening to become a treacly morass of sleuthing vicars, hairdressers and antique dealers.

But for the past three decades, Silent Witness has serenely soldiered on above – or beyond – all these trends. Four years older than the mighty CSI: Crime Scene, it has outlived not only that American forensic drama, but also all the various CSI spinoffs. In other words, the BBC show is obviously doing something right. And a major part of that “something” is a confidence in its subject matter to create clear, ungimmicky storylines.

The new, 29th series gets off with a twisty but entirely plausible two-parter scripted by genre veteran Ed Whitmore. The freshly married Nikki Alexander and Jack Hodgson (Emilia Fox and David Caves) have relocated from London to Birmingham, having agreed to set up a new forensic centre of excellence.

Nikki only consented to the move if they could be accompanied by Lyell Centre colleagues Harriet Maven and Kit Brookes (Maggie Steed and Francesca Mills), and fans of these relatively recent characters will be relieved that the Home Office acceded to her demand.

They’ve barely had time to unpack their scalpel and bone saws, however, when they’re presented with a corpse that has been discovered in the boot of a crashed and stolen BMW. The driver shot a takeaway worker who had come to his assistance and fled.

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It doesn’t take long for the team to identify the killer as a professional hitman, Gary Booth (Adam Rayner), who, once arrested, calmly admits to having killed 15 or 16 people (“always people from my world, who had it coming”). The exception was, he says, Alice Hills, a fitness influencer who went missing five years earlier and whose husband is currently in prison for her murder. We already met Alice in the opening, pre-credit sequence, having sex with her married lover, as someone spies on them from the attic space above.

Gary leads the police to the spot in the woods where he said he buried Alice. The details he provides seem to tally with what the forensics bods discover. But was he fed these details by the real killer?

Silent Witness’s move to Birmingham is part of the BBC’s “Across the UK” strategy, boosting its presence in the region (MasterChef has also relocated there). Britain’s second city is certainly underrepresented on TV drama: Doctors and DI Ray are no more, while Peaky Blinders has moved to Netflix. But the move is also a chance to refresh itself and introduce new characters.

To that end, the police are now represented by old-timer DCI Jilly Bashir and eager, fresh-faced DI Claire Ferris (Zitta Sattar and Mollie Winnard), the latter particularly useful in asking basic questions about pathology on behalf of us without a clue.

Perhaps inevitably in our post-Line of Duty TV world, there’s a suggestion of police corruption, especially as the episode ends with a strangely obstructive desk sergeant hanging from the back of his bedroom door – not so much a cliffhanger as a coat-hook hanger. Suicide or murder?

Either way, this well-worked opener displays all of the show’s enduring strengths, not the least of which is Emilia Fox’s dedication to a role that other actors might have seen as a passing gig. After 20 years of digging into prosthetic corpses and learning lines full of medical terminology, it’s easy to imagine that Fox could do the job she’s currently pretending to perform.

‘Silent Witness’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One

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