What do you do if your son's schoolmate is found killed and you find a pair of stained trainers under his bed? Assume he's the killer while saying nothing at all about it, according to the latest offering from ITV. Only in soapland are things this absurd. "Did you do the washing?" asks mum Rosie (Hermione Norris) in a knowing way, before scouring the web and buying hydrogen peroxide to see if it fizzed when in contact with the suspect trainers. The boy, Jamie (Alexander Arnold) has been acting strangely, moping about, possibly peeping at his mum's boyfriend's daughter Jess (Antonia Clarke) in the shower and downloading dodgy videos onto his laptop. And there we were thinking that was typical behaviour for a teenage boy....
It's hard not to think that a top calibre cast (Martin Clunes as Rosie's boyfriend Ben and Jake Davies as his son Rob add to the good work here) could do so much more with a script centred around how a family copes with juvenile violence and criminality than they can with a ridiculously drawn-out 'did he/didn't he' scenario.
Mum eventually confides in her ex-husband, Jamie's natural father David (Paul McGann), but not before we'd shouted ourselves hoarse: "Just ASK him, you daft woman!" Ex-hubby asks why she hasn't mentioned it to their son. She says he's too fragile after the divorce to handle being suspected. Because, obviously, the only way to broach the subject would be to say: "Did you kill that girl?!" No wonder DC Upton (Nicola Walker) and the victim's mother Kay (Annabelle Apsion) look dazed and confused.
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