TV drama Tough Love passed me by, which probably explains why watching Lenny Blue felt like being lost in a maze.

There was no helpful what-happened-last-time synopsis at the start to set the scene.

It was straight in at the deep end with Ray Winstone returning as a detective with an odd accent - the result of a Londoner trying to talk Northern.

That wasn't half as strange as David Hemmings's eyebrows, which resemble a pair of mating spiders. They make Denis Healy's look positively slim.

His eyebrow hair turned in sterling work in a couple of movies last year and its career is blooming. The trouble is I was so busy watching Hemmings's eyebrows that I forgot to listen to what he was saying as Blue's angry boss.

The general drift was that he's not happy with Lenny's methods of investigation which appear to consist of either threatening suspects or planting/removing (delete where applicable) evidence.

He goes around intimidating people, muttering un-Dixon of Dock Green things like: "I'm going to take a walk to the gents to have a piss, if you're still here when I come back, I might break your neck".

Somebody got to prime suspect and drugs baron Barry Hindes before this belligerent boy in Blue did. He was in the barber's chair when someone pumped him full of bullets.

This made Lenny's verbal threats - "just putting Mr Hindes under a bit of pressure" - seems weedy by comparison. Lenny was trying to nab Hindes with a little help from his driver Toby Anderson, if only his own family's problems didn't keep getting in the way.

For Lenny comes complete with a pair of troublesome teens. He catches his daughter Emma at it on the sofa with, horror of horrors, an older fortysomething man. He handles the situation with as much tact and diplomacy as the Slater family in EastEnders when young Zoe hooked up with older doc Anthony Trueman - he goes ballistic.

Then there's his son James, whose musician friend is found dead in their living room. Don't be surprised if drugs were the cause. Not that Blue is too concerned as he's busy stealing evidence, a gun, from a police locker and burying it.

Winstone is a good actor who can play this type of angry not-so-young man with his eyes closed, even if his accent travels up and down the M1. But on the evidence of this first episode, Lenny Blue doesn't have anything to offer that we haven't seen dozens of times before in the TV cop shop.