The Secret (BBC1)

Here's another fictional drama dealing with an all-too-real issue. There's a lot of them about. This follows the Sarah Lancashire series The Cry, which wraps up the issue of child abuse in a psychological thriller format.

The secret of The Secret - and, as both episodes have been shown, I don't feel guilty about giving it away - is that, as schoolgirls, Emma and Nadia were convicted of killing a child. Released from prison as adults, they've been given new identities and resumed normal life.

It was difficult to watch without recalling the real life cases involving James Bulger and Mary Bell.

The Secret raised questions about the punishment of child killers as well as considering how such people cope, if indeed they do cope, with the knowledge when returned to the outside world.

All this gives the two-parter more credit than it deserves. Despite the seriousness of the subject, a top-notch cast and many good intentions, this proves a rather soapy thriller without any of the rawness of The Cry.

Haydn Gwynne's Emma has successfully put her past behind her. She has a nice husband Alex (Cold Feet's Robert Bathurst), two children and an understanding father.

How unlike the situation of her old schoolfriend Nadia (House Of Eliot's Stella Gonet), who has no job, no partner and a mother who doesn't want to know her.

Like the spurned mistress in Fatal Attraction, she wants revenge for the wrong she feels Emma has done her. "She got away with murder," she snarls, seemingly denying her involvement in the killing.

Her plan involves getting a job in the design business run by Emma and Alex. The work is a means to an end - to seduce Alex, alienate his children from their mother, and destroy the marriage.

She's relying on Emma being unable to say anything about Nadia's shameful past without giving the game away about her own hidden misdeeds.

While Gwynne wears a permanently perplexed look of pain and suffering, Gonet has the more satisfying job of playing the wicked lady, which she does with relish. Nice to see Liver Bird Nerys Hughes again and John Woodvine in supporting roles too.

But no amount of good acting can paper over the holes in the plot or the fact that Nadia has only to flutter her eyelashes at Alex for the poor, weak man to drop everything and leap into bed with her.