9PM BBC1

9PM BBC1 David Suchet (below right) stars in the first of what will be universally described as a 'solid' thriller: each explores a crime through the eyes of the killer. Later episodes will feature the likes of Kevin Whately, Susannah Harker, Keith Allen, Reece Dinsdale, Denise Van Outen and Keeley Hawes - very reliable, midrange sort of people. Suchet is a headmaster who kills a rent boy in self-defence, then, wracked by guilt, tries to take his own life. His nurse daughter Gillian Kearney (below left) steps in to save him. The opening is filmed in classic BBC Drama Grey-o-vision, and adheres to the old-school Stalinist Play For Today view that all middle-class professionals are secret killer perverts (unfortunately countered by the cliché that all drug addicts are too). Hence Suchet might be fundamentally innocent, but he is an ex-marine and his daughter is going out with someone who looks too like him for it not to be an Electra complex. It's intriguing and good, if a little heavy-handed and laughably earnest.

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