Cape cod

TV In case anyone is wondering, I did try watching Cape Wrath or Meadowlands or whatever it's supposed to be called on Channel 4 last night and gave up half way through. Despite having the usually committed performance from David Morrissey (whose surely just biding his time now until he's offered the Doctor Who job) and a fabulous turn from Lucy Cohu as his apparent wife there was only what I can describe as a desperation to it, oh so eager to get the viewer involved that it tipped over into the realm of being annoying and creepy in totally the wrong way.

It's as though the writers have looked at the likes of everything from Twin Peaks to The Prisoner to Desperate Housewives and Lost and tried to do something similar within a 'British' setting. The internal mystery is seductive -- what is Meadowlands and why is it stocked with people on witness protection programmes? The local police liaison isn't all that he seems and Morrissey's real contact is a woman in what looks like surveillance room and when they talk its obvious they know more about the past than we do. Which is annoying.

Unfortunately, rather than presenting us with an ordinary family within these extraordinary circumstances which the audience can relate to, they are just as mysterious as everyone else which puts us at one remove which means the audience lacks an avatar in the world, someone to relate to, something which none of the listed shows forgot to do. I suspect the final twist will be that the family we're supposed to be following aren't a real family or something.

In the end, after yet another of the incessant whip pans and uncomfortably stilted moments of drama I simply couldn't take it any more which is why some of the elements of this review are a bit undernourished. Plus I looked in the Radio Times during the ad-break noticed the next episode was on E4, the synopsis for which gave away the ending of the first, offering precisely the climax I was expecting and I simply couldn't be bothered. It's a rare first episode of a new drama that will do that.