Donovan (ITV1)

THE message was clear: never cheat on a forensic scientist. Joe Donovan could prove his wife wasn't out with the girls but romping around their bed with her lover as a hair taken from the sheets proved there'd been a stranger in the marital lovenest.

Tom Conti, back on TV after 20 years, spent much of Donovan encased in white overalls, hood and mask as he went about his forensic business in Mike Cullen's clevely complicated thriller. The rest of the time he appeared to be in another world, going into a trance and adopting the same glazed look that the rest of us get when watching You've Been Framed.

It has to be said that his conversation was odd. "They say one never tires of sausages," he commented at teatime - a remark that prompted his wife (Samantha Bond) to reply, not unreasonably: "You seem a bit weird."

No wonder she lost interest in him and wandered around in sexy black undies. "You were never here and, when you were, your head was somewhere else," she said explaining why she looked for male companionship elsewhere.

Donovan was a police forensic officer who'd had a breakdown but found lucrative alternative employment as a novelist. But, asked if he missed the police work, he said, "Every day". He was only too happy to become the man in the white protective suit again when a chap was found with his head bashed in and the word DONOVAN written in blood on the wall.

The murder was linked to the case that triggered off his trances, in which the guilty party walked free as a result of Donovan's mistake.

It didn't say much for police investigating the new killing that they allowed Donovan to lend a hand, even when his DNA was found on the murder weapon. Everyone was content to have him wander around, poking his nose in, despite him being the prime suspect.

Back home Mrs Donovan was slipping into a succession of sexy numbers (when not cooking sausages), while his son was filming dad in his trance-like state and inquiring sympathetically: "Are you going loopy again?"

Conti was hardly stretched as he went around with the air of a man who didn't know what he was doing (when clearly he did), while Bond was required to look decorative (and cook sausages).

The real guilty party was the person responsible for the on-air trailer for Donovan. This gave away so much of the plot that it made watching the first of the two episodes redundant.

Published: ??/??/2003