When The Boat Comes In:Boat Story.

Wow! Boat Story is pretty bonkers. It's not the best thing ever and it's certainly not the most credible story ever (some of the characters are ridiculous) but it is great fun from start to finish. Even if you're never quite sure where the start or the finish actually is.

Boat Story (BBC1/iPlayer, created and directed by Harry Williams and Jack Williams with further direction from Daniel Nettheim and Alice Troughton) begins, appropriately enough, with a boat. A boat washed up on a windswept Yorkshire coast. A boat with two dead bodies inside and a shit ton of cocaine.

Two strangers out walking are the first to find the boat and these two will become the heart of the story and become tied to each other for the duration of the drama. They are Janet Campbell (Daisy Haggard - always good) and Samuel Wells (Paterson Joseph - equally reliable) and they're both struggling. We're soon introduced to their back stories.

Janet has lost a hand in a work accident (she wears a prosthetic hand), lives alone in a caravan, and dotes on her former stepson Alan (Oliver Sheridan). But she can only see him in secret because her ex-husband Peter (Craig Kelly) has left Janet for another woman, Suzie (Danielle Warwick), found God, and banished Janet from having contact with Alan.

Samuel is addicted to gambling. A former London lawyer, he's gambled away his house and, because of this, he's relocated to the north with his wife, Camilla (Michele Austin), and deaf daughter, Anya (Cherie Gordon) where he hopes to start a new life. The trouble is both Camilla and Anya are completely oblivious to Samuel's addiction. Like many addicts, he's become very skilled at hiding it.

The discovery of the boat, the dead bodies, and, most of all, the huge amount of bugle presents Janet and Samuel with a dilemma and the decision they make, to sell the cocaine and end their financial problems once and for all, leads them, of course, into a very dangerous, confusing, and, at times, almost surreal world.

In some ways Boat Story reminded me of Steven Moffat's Inside Man in the way it drew seemingly disparate strands and storylines together but, perhaps, more than that it reminded me of The Tourist and that's not such a big surprise as the Williams brothers, Harry and Jack, were behind that too. In fact, Olafur Darri Olafsson who played Billy Nixon in The Tourist wryly narrates the action, with the aid of old fashioned black and white title cards, throughout Boat Story.

And there's a lot of action. Much of it pretty violent. A tongue is cut out, people are hung upside down and bashed around like human pinatas, and nearly an entire police station's worth of coppers are shot dead. Overseeing much of the violence is a character called The Tailor (Tcheky Karyo). A smartly dressed Frenchman with refined tastes (though he warms to pasties), a penchant for extreme sadism, and an obsession with an old black and white film called Les Enfants. An obsession so entrenched that it causes him to fall in love with local pasty seller Pat Tooh (Joanna Scanlan) because she reminds him of the film's leading lady.

The Tailor's henchman, Guy (Craig Fairbrass), is a heartless killing machine who shows no mercy for his victims or feels any remorse for his actions. His only weak spot, it seems, is a sadness that he was never able to fulfil his dream of becoming a potter. As he chases after the missing drugs, and after Janet and Samuel, he manages to notch up quite an impressive tally of dead bodies.

Elsewhere, local drug dealer Vinnie (Adam Gillen), another sadist with anger management issues, gets in above his depth and Pat Tooh's son, Ben (Ethan Lawrence) - a bumbling policeman who loves prawns in black bean sauce, finds what could be a vital clue but is mostly ignored by his seniors because he's, not to put too fine a point on it, a pain in the arse.

As the action jumps backwards and forwards in time we see people locked in storage containers, decapitated heads are found in fields, dogs end up covered in blood, dick pics are sent and people stab themselves in the leg on purpose so they can go to hospital. It's grisly and violent but it's also silly and fun. In that respect it reminded me of Martin McDonagh films like In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

I'm not sure the storyline about the former lag Craig (Phil Daniels) making a (dreadful) play out of it (with Jason Pennycooke as Samuel and Lucy Montgomery as Janet) really adds much to Boat Story but it doesn't distract from it either. Apparently the show divided many viewers. Some loved it and some hated it. That seems about right as the show divided this single viewer. I thought it was incredibly daft and the violence very gratuitous - but I also thoroughly enjoyed it. It turns out you get more than a fishy on a little dishy when the boat comes in.