Comedy returns

BBC2’s MotherFatherSon announced its status as a classy thriller in the traditional way: by ensuring that for quite a long time we had no idea what was going on.

At first it looked as if the focus would be on a missing teenager whose phone we saw abandoned in the woods. But then we cut to an American called Max (Richard Gere, no less) arriving in London by private jet on an apparent mission to choose our next prime minister. Then to a younger man running fast and screaming.

Then to a veteran female journalist being sacked — and not only because she’d just lit a cigarette at her desk. Then back to the young screamer, who by now had revealed himself as the newspaper’s coked-up editor. Then to a woman working in a homeless centre. Then back to Max taking tea at Downing Street, where his impressive sophistication was perhaps rather undermined by his total astonishment at the existence of something called shortbread. (‘Short… bread?’ he muttered wonderingly.)

Eventually, the programme could put it off no longer and was forced to bring these elements together. As well as an all-powerful media mogul, Max is the father of the coked-up editor Caden (Billy Howle), and the woman in the homeless centre is Caden’s mother Kathryn (Helen McCrory). The veteran fag-smoker has also teamed up with another journo to bring Max down, apparently with the aid of that missing-teenager business.

Meanwhile, the signifiers of classy television continued to pile up: the lavish sets; the regular use of slightly pointless aerial shots; the dialogue in which highly polished remarks are exchanged with actorly aplomb.

Oddly, when it came to auditioning possible PMs, Max proved something of pushover. ‘I can hear them, out there,’ the idealistic Angela Howard (Sarah Lancashire) told him.