Murder In Mind (BBC1)

LIFE wasn't going well for Tom Robbins. He wasn't so much having a bad day as several months of bad days. He'd lost his business and was having to work for the man who bought it. He'd lost his wife and daughter. He'd lost his home and moved into a grotty bedsit.

Things couldn't possibly get any worse. Well, yes, of course, they could as Eric Deacon's tricky little tale demonstrated in Justice, latest in the occasional series of psychological dramas known as Murder In Mind.

The last straw for Tom came when three teenage hooligans pushed in front of him and daughter Holly in the queue for ice cream. The trio weren't good advertisements for the youth of today. They were rude, swore and made threatening gestures.

Tom saw red and manhandled of them. They retaliated by throwing stones at his car. "Darren can be a little difficult," admitted his headmaster when Tom reported the incident.

The cycle of attack and counter-attack had been set in motion. After Tom was beaten up on his doorstep by masked men, police were not very helpful. "It's like Beirut out there," said the officer, showing little sign of wanting to be a UN peacekeeper.

How perceptive of Tom's estranged wife Helen to say, "I'm worried this is getting out of control". She didn't help by telling him, just as he thought he'd hit rock bottom, that she was thinking of moving in with another man - a policeman.

All the while, the viewer was trying to anticipate the twist in the tale, the whole point of the Murder In Mind exercise. When the killing happened, it was satisfyingly sudden and offbeat. Then, to crown it all, Deacon's script achieved a double whammy with a twist in the twist.

Adrian Dunbar wore a permanent expression of aggrieved helplessness and might just as well had the word "loser" stamped across his forehead, with Cold Feet's Helen Baxendale as his anxious wife and Colin Salmon as her is-he-as-nice-as-he-makes-out? boyfriend.

A pleasant enough way to pass an hour, although I wouldn't have missed Bad Girls over on ITV1 to watch it. Where else could you see a wife using a turkey baster to impregnate herself with the "raw material" collected from her gay husband by his young lover? Try explaining that parentage to the child.

Published: ??/??/2003