He’s the scariest man on TV… and he wants his missing millions back: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

Payback (ITV):

Rating:

DNA Family Secrets (BBC2): 

Rating:

Being the scariest man on television must have its perks. It’s easy to imagine Peter Mullan can walk into any crowded restaurant, ask for the best table, and the place will clear.

‘You don’t say No to me,’ he told terrified widow Lexie (Morven Christie) in Payback (ITV1), after arranging for her to be mugged by two thugs on a moped, just so he could meet her. ‘That’s not how it works.’

Mullan has cornered the market in menacing crime lords, in dramas such as Top Of The Lake (opposite Elisabeth Moss, in a performance to make your blood run cold) and the Netflix money-laundering thriller Ozark.

And his presence brought a hard central focus to the swirling confusion in the opening episode of Payback, when nobody else knew what was going on — least of all Lexie.

Mullan is corrupt Edinburgh businessman Cal Morris, the subject of a covert police operation as he tries to transfer a couple of million quid in euros through a series of banks and shell companies.

Every time the plot returned to the ruthless Mr Morris and his henchman, the peripheral stuff ceased to matter

Being the scariest man on television must have its perks. It’s easy to imagine Peter Mullan can walk into any crowded restaurant, ask for the best table, and the place will clear 

All he cares about is his money. Everyone else — the detectives, Lexie and her accountant husband, Jared — is stressed, bickering or working on secret schemes to double-cross rivals. The more anxious they became, the less easy it was to care about their individual problems.

Much of the first part was taken up with Lexie’s worries about her children’s nanny, and whether they were going to McDonald’s instead of the playpark. But every time the plot returned to the ruthless Mr Morris and his henchman (Steven Mackintosh), the peripheral stuff ceased to matter.

That saved us from worrying about some of the less plausible twists. Jared is fatally stabbed outside a tobacconist’s and, as Lexie watches tearfully, the paramedics try to bring him back to life on the pavement with electric shocks from a defibrillator. I’m no cardiac surgeon but that seems like strange treatment for a man with a knife wound through his heart.

Suspecting that Lexie knows more about the murder than she’s saying, detectives confront her with Jared’s credit card statements, which appear to show he was having an affair and planning to leave her. Charming.

Then they break into her house and fit a listening device. That might be acceptable if she were a terrorist… but her only offence is to be married to a man who got himself killed after buying a packet of cigarettes, when he claimed to have given up smoking. It hardly seems like a case for GCHQ.

By the end of the hour, Lexie was pouring herself a mega-glass of white wine and glugging it as she sobbed at the kitchen table. If you can think of a TV drama this year where that scene hasn’t happened, please send me a postcard.

Stacey Dooley was doing more reliable detective work in DNA Family Secrets on BBC2

Stacey Dooley was doing more reliable detective work in DNA Family Secrets (BBC2). She doesn’t need to conceal microphones in people’s houses — she’s a human listening device.

All Stacey has to do is cock her head with a sympathetic smile, and she coaxes a lifetime of suppressed heartache from her subjects.

This time, she helped 77-year-old Anthony from Liverpool to discover the identity of his biological father, a half-Italian U.S. GI who had a one-night stand with a girl he met at a dance hall during World War II.

And twin sisters Sydney and Madison, born by in vitro fertilisation, traced the woman whose egg was used in their conception.

These stories are less revelatory than they once were, now we’re getting used to what DNA can uncover. The only surprise was that no one was related to a celeb. But it’s still all quite moving.

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