A Well Planned Nightmare:The Suspect.

How can a television programme be both completely compelling and absolute shit at the same time? You'd not think it possible but ITV Hub's recent The Suspect (written by Peter Berry, adapted from a Michael Robotham book, and directed by both James Strong and Camilla Strom Henriksen) managed to be that show!

It was shit because the acting was, for the most part, dreadful. Many of the cast are fine actors whom I've seen in other things acting very well. But, for some reason - and I began to suspect it was intentional, here they're mugging it up as if they're part of an amateur dramatics society putting on a production of Pirates of Penzance. Virtually no scenery in The Suspect remained unchewed.

The makers of the show also had an overbearing penchant for zany camera angles and when they didn't seem sure how to end a scene they'd simply fade it out or turn the camera sideways and move out. It got quite annoying. Less annoying, but equally pointless, was the long panning shots over London and Liverpool, the two cities in which the action takes places.

A recognisably grey, if geographically inaccurate, London consisted of well known landmarks like The Shard, the BT Tower, the Walkie Talkie, and London Bridge. You could play spot the sight. Ooh, look it's Coal Drops Yard near KX (complete with converted gasholder), it's Tower 42, and it's Mario's Cafe in Kentish Town. As made famous by Saint Etienne.

It's the same for Liverpool. There's both the cathedrals either end of Hope Street, there's Albert Dock, and there's the Radio City Tower. None of this really helps with the story but as I love both London and Liverpool I found the shots quite enjoyable.

The story was anything but. It started dark and got darker as the five episodes went on. Following a vaguely superfluous, but exciting and vertigo inducing, introduction we begin with the discovery of a dead body in a cemetery. Not one that has been legally interred there either.

It's that of a young woman, Catherine McCain (played in flashback by Tara Lee), and she's been buried in a shallow grave. There are twenty-one, apparently self-inflicted, stab wounds in her body and the thrust of the drama will be trying to find out who is responsible for her murder. Which already sounds confusing if the stab wounds are, as we've been told, self-inflicted.

The storyline beggars belief but, perhaps because it is so far fetched, it soon becomes rather addictive. I might have turned off but I had to find out what happened. Investigating officers DI Ruiz (Shaun Parkes, perhaps the hammiest cop I've seen on telly since Cop Rock was aired back in 1990) and DS Devi (Anjli Mohindra somehow manages to wear a leather vest and still look cool) call on the services of clinical psychologist Dr Joe O'Loughlin (Aidan Turner) and it is O'Loughlin who becomes the very heart of the drama.

O'Loughlin is both successful and celebrated in his field of work but he's recently been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's (at just 42 years old) and he seems to be using that as an excuse for some very strange and suspicious behaviour. Mind you, it's not as if anyone else in The Suspect doesn't act suspiciously.

It soon transpires that O'Loughlin knew the victim in at least a professional context and she had even made accusations that he had sexually assaulted her. Something he brushes off as part and parcel of his work. O'Loughlin, however, is morally ambiguous at best and his wife Jasmine (Camilla Beeput) is fully aware of that.

Soon the evidence against O'Loughlin starts to become overwhelming but he remains determined to prove his innocence and find a way out of what he refers to as a "well planned nightmare". One of his patients Bobby (Bobby Schofield who seems to excel in playing troubled youngsters) has both an obsession with the number '21' and a fascination with hurting women (as well as a belief that air can scream in pain) and O'Loughlin starts to suspect that Bobby may know something about Catherine's murder.

But is O'Loughlin simply setting Bobby up as a fall guy? Has O'Loughlin even convinced himself he's not guilty? Is Dr Jack Owens (Adam James) really O'Loughlin's friend or does he have ulterior motives? Is the inclusion of O'Loughlin's business partner Fenwick (Sian Clifford) and friendly plumber DJ (Tom McKay) to the story anything more than padding and exposition?

Or is there something very different going on here? It's to the makers of The Suspect's credit that we find ourselves in a place where we can't trust anyone. As the story unfolds, and multiple coincidences pile up on top of each other, it starts to get very weird and even pretty eerie. What is the relevance of the carved whale or the smell of chloroform? 

The Suspect took us to a very dark place in the end and the fact it was able to do so with such dreadful acting chops made it, in some way, even more of a curious watch than it may have been if the cast had been asked to act properly. A disturbing view. In more ways than one.