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Murder Island features eight real-life ‘ordinary people’ seeking to solve a fictional killing on a fictional Scottish island. What follows is so confused and confusing that you can only imagine it was pitched to Channel 4 as ‘Broadchurch meets The Apprentice’ and nodded through as a result, without anybody asking such pesky questions as ‘So how might that work, then?’ Or if they did, that they were silenced by the news that Ian Rankin was signed on as the writer — whatever that might mean, seeing as most of the programme is necessarily unscripted and the investigation itself impossible to plot in advance.

Tuesday’s opening episode began with the ordinary folk meeting Parm Sandhu, a former police chief superintendent who’s clearly retrained as an Alan Sugar impersonator. Alongside her are a pair of male ex-coppers for whom the word ‘burly’ is hard to avoid and whose chief task is to shake their heads at the contestants’ incompetence.

The four teams of two are charged with finding out who stabbed a young woman called Charly Hendricks in her rented manse. The one that does will win an impressive 50 grand, with the weaker teams being fired along the way. Which, at this stage, doesn’t bode well for Dot and Rox, a couple of determinedly bubbly Londoners with a self-confessed tendency ‘to wee at each other’. (Luckily, this turned out to mean that they make each other laugh.) Before long, they’d earned some serious head-shaking by cheerfully strolling through the blood at the crime scene.

Gradually, a storyline emerged — although only for the viewers, who, unlike the contestants, had the benefit of several flashbacks. Charly, it seems, was involved with both a campaign against a proposed tourism centre and the married woman who works in the post office.