Get Outta My Car, Get Into My Nightmares:The Responder S2.

"The same fucking mistakes over and over again. Just when I think I'm moving in the right direction" - Chris Carson

Police officer Chris Carson (Martin Freeman) is still working nights, he's still on 'response', he's still got serious anger management issues, and he's still bedevilled by his demons - though he is trying to be a better person. He's even attending a male mental health group. Though the chair of that group is the unlikely named Father Liam Neeson (Matthew Cottle) and he's got his own problems. He likes the booze so much he'd make a great character in a Graham Greene novel.

Series two of The Responder (BBC1/iPlayer, created by Tony Schumacher and directed. variously, by Mounia Akl, Jeannette Nordahl, and Charlotte Regan sees him separated from his wife Kate (MyAnna Buring) and struggling to fit his nightshifts in with visits to his daughter Tilly (Romi Hyland-Rylands). Kate's paired up with Chris's nemesis, fellow copper Ray Mullen (Warren Brown) and she's on the verge of accepting a job in London which would mean relocating from Liverpool and putting two hundred miles between Chris and Tilly.

Something Chris is none too happy about. He's looking to move to day work and he's applied for a job but he's tipped off that he won't get it because everyone thinks he's a "knobhead". Instead, he manages to get caught up in a war between two of Merseyside's leading drug dealers. The always excellent Adam Nagaitis plays Franny Sutton and when Chris searches Franny's garage and finds something disturbing, Franny (who hides his criminal enterprise under the front of a plastering business) uses that to compromise Chris and his colleague Rachel (Adelayo Adebayo).

Rachel starts the series partnered with the irritating Eric (Ian Puleston-Davies), who waffles on endlessly about The Pirates Of Penzance, and regularly considers burning herself with an iron (preferable, she suggests, than working in response) but, inevitably, she ends up embroiled in Chris's mess.

She even brings a fresh mess of her own to proceedings when she takes it up on herself to try and warn her abusive ex-partner Steve's (Philip Barantini) new girlfriend Lorna (Izuka Hoyle) about his behaviour. Something she doesn't handle particularly well.

Following husband Carl's death in the first series, his widow Jodie (Faye McKeever) is getting their drug empire up and running again with help from 'baghead' Casey (Emily Fairn) and hapless Marco (Josh Finan). Jodie works at an ice cream parlour (and sells drugs from there), and Casey and Marco work the nightclubs. Marco briefly holds down a day job at Krunchy Fried Chicken and is looking after his young baby after the mother, Moire (Debbie Brannen), is sent to prison for assaulting someone she believed was, but wasn't, a paedophile.

He's not a natural when it comes to fatherhood. The goonish henchmen Barry (Mark Womack) and Ian (Philip S McGuinness) are back to create further trouble and Chris and Rachel's colleague DCI Debs Barnes (Amaka Okafor) has clearly got herself into something way over head which will further test Chris's patience. On top of that he's dealing with a very uneasy reconciliation with his estranged father Tom (played by Bernard Hill in his last ever role, Hill - most famous for playing Yosser Hughes in Boys From The Blackstuff - having died earlier this month).

Tom had been a mostly absent father - spending most of his time in the pub - and there is, at first, little love lost between Tom and Chris. With his mum now dead, Chris tells Tom, in no uncertain terms, that he considers him to be a "fucking cunt". If you don't like f-bombs and c-bombs, don't watch The Responder, they go off as regularly as air-to-ground munitions in Gaza.

All of these strands can get a little confusing at times and it takes a while for the second series to get going but when it does we see Chris, Rachel, and everyone else thrown into a world of guns, blackmail, death threats, double crossing, assaults with torches, unappetising looking meals, social workers, antiquated mobile phones, CAPITAL LETTER TEXT MESSAGES, and, rather oddly, dancing to The Magnetic Fields.

There are nearly as many very bad people in The Responder as there are cups of tea consumed. There are odd people too. People with too many cats, people with too many dogs, eccentric pissheads, and people who throw actual shit at coppers. There's a cameo from Kevin Eldon as a man with no memory who doesn't understand that it gets dark after sunset and there's also appearances from two Brookside legends in Sue Johnston and Sue Jenkins. They were both in Coronation Street too - but it's their roles in Brookside (as Sheila Grant and Jackie Corkhill) that matter to me.

But I digress. As for this series of The Responder? It's bleaker than the first series - nihilistic in places even - but it's not quite as good. I didn't find it as gripping. But it's still an enjoyable watch. Even if you are never in doubt that to live the life of any one of the characters in The Responder would be far from enjoyable. Watch it. Don't live it.