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Yet there were a few clues, or wisps of clues, to suggest that her suspicions about Greg's death might not be entirely unjustified. Her husband had no history of infidelity, Ellie couldn't find any trace of the mystery woman an exotic blonde called Milena Livingstone when she trawled through his emails, and Milena's husband responded with a bloodless lack of emotion when Ellie tried to quiz him about his wife. He assumed she'd been having an affair with Greg, though without any tangible evidence, and neither this nor her death seemed to bother him much.

Snag was, while the performances - Friel's especially - were strong enough to keep you watching, there isn't enough to go on to make the piece truly gripping. If Greg was merely having an affair, it would be tragic for his wife but not all that fascinating for anybody else.

If there is some dark conspiracy lurking beneath the superficial facts, so far we have no idea what it might be. Is Ellie going to go increasingly bonkers over the remaining two episodes? And will we stick around to find out?

View previous newsletters. Skip to main content. Search form Search. Not-so-perfect marriage? Ellie was going through a Truly, Madly, Deeply phase of having lengthy conversations with her dead husband, who kept coming back to pay her extremely life-like visits.

Bigger mystery was why after the chap burned to death in the car it was parked outside the house for the rest of the show without a scratch on it. Some of the programme was poetic "The fate that awaits all things — to be broken down, to be recycled, to be reborn" ; some rather boring a long digression into supplying sandwiches to the US army ; much of it was disgusting I simply cannot bear to describe the unspeakable chicken , but much was fascinating.

How colonies of bacteria send signals to each other like an invading army; how slime mould can find its way to food in the centre of a maze.

After 30 days, 10, flies — mostly drunk from the alcohol in the fruit bowl — were wholly in charge. I bailed out on Day 44 when the beetles arrived and the Prof discovered 1, flies in a bottle of claret and insisted on presenting fistfuls under our noses.

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View offers. They all tried to cook — actually, some of them even managed, though none attempted porridge, this being Englandland — for one another in Come Date With Me , a slightly spurious spin-off, though I'm sure it'll be none the less fabulously successful for it, of Come Dine with Me , one of the surprise "reality" successes of late.

Best thing about these shows is, of course, the gleefully critical voiceovers by Dave Lamb; his cynical delight at the many failings of Generation Britpop is starting to sound like a Greek chorus for our age. Undoubtedly the worst is the interminable previewing and recapping pre and post adverts, as if we were unable to remember what had happened on our screens three minutes ago, when the only way we were actually likely to forget was by being driven to a state of loll-tongued torpor by the interminable recaps.

The twist here is that it's not one girl being successively wooed by a series of chaps, individually, with their massively varied cooking skills and levels of charm, but by all of them, each night. This means the chaps have to cook not just for one pretty girl — Tracey this time, a petite year-old "trainee drama teacher" — but for her other four suitors as well.

I had thus expected much dreadful Apprentice -style willie-waving, but actually the guys, for the first couple of nights at least, seemed actually to like one another, even though they all fancied Tracey. Perhaps this metrosexual Generation Britpop is less chest-bumping than my own. Perhaps there are snakes bubbling under the skin, as yet unleashed. Ghastlily, guiltily watchable.

There's too little time and space to get into the intricate successfulnesses of Restoration Man George Clarke's two programmes on The Great British Property Scandal but, trust me, he is now doing for empty homes what Jamie has been trying to do for food. The angrier he got, the angrier I, and I hope you, got. Empties are like chewing gum on pavements. We never noticed them: now we do. Black Mirror , on a full week ago today but I insist on mentioning it, was brilliant.