The Honourable Woman could have done with some help from an overpaid executive in a suit

BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have secrets. We all tell lies just to keep them from each other and …pause to indicate psychological profundity …from ourselves.’ Luckily for the viewer, this was accompanied by the sight of man in a restaurant being stabbed to death by a waiter in front of his young son and daughter.

As it turned out, this would set the tone for much of what followed — an hour of drama that combined memorable set-pieces with slightly too transparent an insistence on its own significance. Meanwhile, we cut to 29 years later where the daughter Nessa’s blood-splattered dress had been replaced by robes of state, as she became Baroness Stein of Tilbury.

By then, Nessa (Maggie Gyllenhaal) had inherited her father’s business, although not his politics. Instead of providing Israel with arms, she was using the family money as part of her mission to bring peace to the Middle East by supplying the Palestinians with broadband and music scholarships. And if that sounds a bit ambitious, well so is the programme.

Hugo Blick, whose first big TV project this is since 2011’s The Shadow Line, seems to have pulled off the Stephen Poliakoff trick of being allowed to produce, write and direct more or less whatever he wants — in this case an eight-part series that promises to blend the personal with the geopolitical. In theory, all TV reviewers are in favour of giving creative talent this kind of freedom. In practice, Blick, like Poliakoff, could perhaps do with an overpaid executive in a suit occasionally telling him to rein in the theatricality of his dialogue, and the tendency to light and direct every scene to within an inch of its life.