Sharp family saga with a thriller uneasily attached: ITV’s Flesh and Blood reviewed

As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in a fierce competition as to which of them we could trust the least. The early front runner was Mark (Stephen Rea), a retired surgeon whom the not-long widowed Viv (Francesca Annis) introduced to her three grown-up children as her new boyfriend. But was Mark all he appeared to be? And if not, was this necessarily a bad thing — given that what he appeared to be was spectacularly shifty?

Soon, though, the grown-up children had plenty of other people to worry about, including themselves, as they messed up their lives in an impressive variety of ways. Helen (Claudie Blakley), first seen sucking needfully on a gin and tonic, was a high-flying NHS management consultant, whose neglected husband proved susceptible to any ladies pretending to share his interests, however uninteresting. (‘I rewired the whole place myself,’ he told one woman in a pub during a particularly comprehensive description of his DIY activities. ‘Really?’ she replied, leaving him immediately smitten.) Natalie (Lydia Leonard) had spent the past five years waiting for her married lover to initiate a much-promised divorce rather than merely repeating his catchphrase, ‘Leave it with me’. Jake (Russell Tovey), a recovering alcoholic and fitness instructor, was estranged from his own wife after running up huge gambling debts, and now sought to clear them by becoming a gigolo for an older and impeccably empowered local solicitor. But was she actually as happy as she claimed to keep the relationship purely financial?

Meanwhile, coming up fast on the rails in the untrustworthiness stakes was Mary (Imelda Staunton), Viv’s next-door neighbour on the Sussex coast. At first sight, Mary was a classic Good Soul: selfless to the point of self-martyring, a reliable supplier of freshly baked cakes and a woman whose two main ways of announcing her presence were ‘Yoo-hoo’ and ‘It’s only me’.Yet,