I Remember Nothing:Close To Me.

"I’ve waited hours for this, I’ve made myself so sick, I wish I’d stayed asleep today. I never thought this day would end. I never thought tonight could ever be .... this close to me" - Close To Me, The Cure

"The gaps are enormous. We stare from each side. We were strangers for way too long" - I Remember Nothing - Joy Division

Chilling. That's the first word that comes to mind with regards to Channel 4's recent drama Close To Me. There may have been plot holes you could have driven a truck through and the odd loose end that never really got tied up but that didn't, in the end, really matter because Close To Me was a thrilling ride from start to finish.

By the end of the first of six episodes I was hooked and I genuinely had no idea where it was all going. Though I felt certain it was probably a very dark place. All that doom laden dramatic music, the voices off camera that create a sense of discombobulation, and the overhead shots of cars driving down quiet country lanes in the dead of night.

Close To Me (directed by Michael Samuels and with a screenplay by Angela Pell, adapted from an Amanda Reynolds novel) never really let up on the tension. We begin with Jo Harding (Connie Nielsen) lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs, covered in blood. We see husband Rob (Christopher Eccleston) rushing her to hospital, repeating "Jo, please don't leave me" - which won't be the last time he pleads with her - and then we see her, after spending a week in an induced coma, regain consciousness.

Though not regain memory. For Jo, the whole last year has been erased from her mind. Apart from a few, often disturbing - and possibly unreliable, flashbacks. When she returns to their very posh and modern family home, Frank Lloyd Wright could have built it - they've clearly got some money, near Hastings there's a suggestion she may have been drunk when she fell down the stairs.

There's also a suggestion that that would have been quite out of character for Jo. The last thing she can remember clearly is her son Finn (Tom Taylor) leaving to go to university but it soon becomes apparent that this event, and perhaps others, triggered an unravelling, or at least a major change, in Jo's life.

The problem is she can't remember anything and nobody seems to be helping her to remember it either. At home, as well as a piano, rooms full of bookshelves, and a well stocked fridge, there's a gardener called Owen (Jamie Flatters). Owen is young, handsome, and has, according to Rob, been gardening with his shirt off all summer and Jo's been having vague memories of passionate, and almost certainly adulterous, love making with someone.

Could it be Owen? An image of milk spurting, almost ejaculating, from a bottle hints strongly at that and when Owen jokes, rather lamely I thought - as well as a bad fit for this kind of drama, that he has "handled" her "lobelia" it certainly seems possible but then so does almost anything. The unopened condom packet Jo finds on the lawn only confuses matters further.

Why is everyone acting so strange or is it all in Jo's mind? Is she hallucinating? Is she going mad? Is she being gaslit and, if so, by who? Why is her phone still missing? How does the dog sitter Wendy (Ellie Haddington) fit in to all this and why is she being so strange? Is she even a dog sitter? When a friend, Cathy (Susan Lynch) comes to visit she reveals that her and Jo had fallen out some months ago. Jo can't remember why and Cathy, initially, won't tell her.

Rob, too, is being secretive. Is he really protecting Jo's feelings when he refuses to tell her that her beloved dog has died? He's not completely straight with her when it comes to business matters either. His previously successful string of estate agent offices is struggling and he's brought in a supremely confident financial advisor Anna (Leanne Best) who advises him to close two of the four branches and streamline the other two.

For which, read let people go and ask Jo for a loan. Daughter Sash (Rosy McEwen) has hooked up with her boss, hipster bar owner Thomas (Nick Blood) and is expecting a baby. Thomas is a bit of a prick and though he's able to turn on the louche bad boy charm for Sash, and Jo, Rob sees through him immediately. Not least when he finishes the wine bottle off without offering Rob a top up.

It creates a frosty atmosphere between Sash and her parents and things with Finn are, for reasons that later become clear, equally chilly. But the first truly chilling moment of Close To Me comes when Jo calls her dad, Frederik (Henning Jensen), in his nursing home and he furiously demands she no longer contact him, that she stops giving him pills, and stops stealing from him.

Rob tells Jo it's dementia and though that seems quite plausible, Jo's finding it hard to believe anything anyone tells her. Or even anything she sees. She's seeing people in the house and in the garden who appear not to be there, she keeps finding the word HELP scratched into walls, and she's having horrific nightmares about her dead dog and even more worrying ones about dead mermaids washing up in the Birling Gap.

Dreams, they complicate her life. Though it's complicated enough anyway. Among leaflets from the Hastings Refugee Centre she finds a thankyou card from someone called Nick (Ray Fearon). It transpires she briefly worked at the refugee centre with Nick and a lady called Rose (Kate O'Flynn) who pays a visit to Jo which causes yet more confusion.

On the way to a head injury support group she beats up a man who attempts to mug her and at the 'headbanger' group itself she runs into angry and disturbed Jerry (Joe Tucker), Sharon (Amy Booth-Steel) - who seems doomed by head injury to repeat the same shit joke about grinding coffee for the rest of her life, and Helen (Lorraine Burroughs) who greets her with the line "welcome to the madhouse".

Helen, it seems, is the only person Jo feels confident in talking to about what's happened, and what is happening, to her. Jo describes feeling like a stranger inside her own head and Helen counters that recovering from a serious head injury is like piecing together a broken vase. In the dark. On a rollercoaster.

With the disinhibition caused by her accident, Jo's behaviour starts to untangle not just the events of the last twelve months but decades of family dysfunction. Even going as far back as her childhood in Denmark where we see young Jo (played by Rosa Niemann) playing on beaches, cutting dolls' heads off, and cowering in her bed as her parents fight.

There's allusions to an event that happened fifteen years previously - "that which cannot be mentioned" - and each new revelation provides us with twist after twist, chill after chill. The chill factor hit rate is astonishingly high and yet confusion remains almost to the very end. Jo's 'lost' year is initially presented to us, and her, as a year in which her life went seriously wrong in some way and yet people keep telling her that she'd been 'radiant' and that she'd 'blossomed'.

Could it be that both of these things are true? You'll need to watch until the very end to find out and, once you're in, you won't find that very difficult because it's addictive stuff. It's not perfect. Far from it. Jo's voice over can get annoying, there's a cringe inducing charity gala where Rob makes a complete tit of himself that's hard to watch, and the scenes of Rob looking pensive at the swimming pool don't really add much value.

I'm not sure we need quite so many scenes where Jo overhears her extraordinarily careless friends and family talking about her behind her back and, shapely legs or not, the sight of bruised and sore Jo struggling to pull her trousers up becomes a little repetitive. But, among the beautiful scenery of the South Downs, the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head, Close To Me tells a taut and tense story of one person struggling to make sense of their life. Both in the present, the barely remembered recent past, and all the way back to their childhood.

Though Jo Harding began by remembering nothing, by the end it seemed she'd remembered almost everything. The question remaining was what would she do with all these memories.