Get In The Sea:The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe.

I vaguely knew the story of John Darwin. I remember that he went missing off the coast near his home in Seaton Carew, County Durham in the early 2000s (2002) and that it was later revealed he'd faked his own death in a canoe accident. But I hadn't realised just quite how deep the deception went or how complex the series of events that unfolded became.

I'd certainly put time aside to consider how it must have affected his family. ITV's The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (created and written by Chris Lang, based on a memoir by David Leigh, and directed by Richard Laxton) did all that for me. It seemed correct, also, that the story came from the viewpoint of John's wife, Anne, for while John was essentially a fantasist and something of a control freak and their sons Mark and Anthony were completely innocent victims, Anne's story, as narrated by her, was far more nuanced and, at times, powerful and upsetting.

The story begins in Seaton Carew in 2000. John (Eddie Marsan) and Anne (Monica Dolan, excellent as always) are struggling. John, as usual, has been spending way beyond his means. Buying things he can't afford. A Range Rover with ludicrously expensive personalised numberplates and not just one house, but two houses, to convert into a B'n'B.

The Darwins are in massive debt and the bailiffs are regularly heard knocking on the door. Anne wants to file for bankruptcy but John's got a different solution. He thinks he should fake his own death and they can cash in on his life assurance. Initially, Anne refuses to go along with this - for all the reasons any sane person would refuse to - but John blackmails her with suicide threats and soon enough he's heading off into the grey waters of Tees Bay in a knackered old canoe.

While, of course, making sure lots of neighbours and passers-by see him doing so. Anne dutifully reports him missing to the police and soon there are boats and helicopters out looking for him, the story is in the papers and on the television news, and there's nearly as many press people outside the house as there are police.

When, after four days, the search is called off and John reconnects with Anne, his plans for the next stage get crazier and crazier and life, for Anne at least, complicit now in John's crime, becomes near unbearable. There is trouble with the life insurance claim, there's the heartbreak she feels about lying to her grown up sons - Mark (Mark Stanley) and Anthony (Dominic Applewhite), and there's an intense gnawing fear that the police will come knocking at any moment.

Yet, she's in too deep now - and struggles to see a way out of the mess. She means to do well. She loves her family but she feels trapped and, sometimes, she seems to have faith that John will miraculously turn things round. He's the only man she's ever loved, and - it's implied - the only man that's ever loved her, so she desperately needs to believe that.

The skill of this programme is that you find yourself sympathising with her. With John, it's not so easy. He likes to call himself "a man who thinks outside the box" but he mentally controls his wife, he's incredibly selfish, and he's about as able to execute a cunning plan as Blackadder's Baldrick. While he's in hiding he takes to reading Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal and it's not Charles de Gaulle he's identifying with.

This bizarre story fills four episodes far easier than I thought it would have done. While it touches on themes of marital coercion and how some people feel they lack an identity without a partner, it is the all too human scenes which elicit the strongest emotions.

Anne's powerful love for her sons, their eventual feelings of betrayal, and the first Christmas dinner without John present. Even though he's not actually dead. All these normally resonant occasions remain resonant and are portrayed tenderly but are all clouded by the one big crime, the one huge lie, that underpins the entire drama and shapes the entire family dynamic.

When it all comes crumbling down, for Anne - and I didn't know this - in Panama, we are, inevitably, treated to a series of interviews in nondescript police station offices. Despite the huge web of deception, I still found myself feeling sorry for Anne and, very occasionally, even John. Most of all I felt for Anthony and Mark who had had their entire world pulled from under them.

As so often, I had a little cry towards the end. But what a journey it had been. It had taken in a rather wry Mrs Merton reference, a role for David Fynn as David Leigh - the Daily Mirror reporter based in Miami who flew to Panama in an attempt to become the first to tell Anne's story, and an unexpected appearance (for me) by Karl Pilkington as DC Phil Bayley.

He was rather good but he was, as was everyone else, eclipsed by the brilliant Doolan, the incredible story of the Darwin family, and a really rather gripping telling of it. Faking your own death in a canoe accident is a terrible idea. For you, for your wife, for your children, and for pretty much everyone really. But it turns out it does make for good television.