Sarah Dempster

I Will Find You is classic small-screen Coben, which is to say: maddeningly watchable crap with bells on.

There are no huge surprises and several gifted actors seem to be locked in an interminable WWE cage match with a script that requires them to say things that no human should ever be required to utter (“Adulting is no joke!”). But oh, the lake!

The dialogue is, as ever, fabulous. .... How best to reward such exquisitely knowing escapism? Ten stars? Ten thousand stars? Rivals is beyond earthly praise.

Now that we know not to trust either Hegarty or Lenker, the tension is, this time round, even greater. Suspense builds, continues to build and then – flamin’ Nora – builds some more.

But oh, the script. The awful, awful script. So blunderingly crude is it, so sluggish its attempts at emotional depth, and so mean-spirited its approach to everything else, you may, like me, find your shoulders sagging and your soul slumping like a winded beanbag.

Tennant’s voiceover is pitch perfect, but the absurdist energy that powered Morton’s previous projects is, alas, no longer there. What’s more, the series appears unsure of its targets.

It’s an altogether milder kettle of trout. It is, in essence, a Saga cruise in a Stetson; a languid meditation on retirement stuffed with cloying aphorisms and thuddingly simplistic depictions of grief.

Suspense builds, continues to build, and then – the tension! – builds some more. How long before the elastic snaps back? .... If there is a tauter, clammier or more engrossing drama this year I will eat my mortarboard with chips.

It doesn’t help that Fiennes Tiffin has been teamed with the explosively charismatic Finn, whose presence here reduces everyone within the blast zone to a smoking hillock of moustache. Still. The Tintinny stuff is a hoot and Firth is a blustery joy. And there’s a breeziness to all the capering that ensures even at its most geezerish, this is one Guy Ritchie joint wot ain’t entirely pony.

A strange and exasperating thing that clomps between aerated royal soap, plodding police procedural, exuberant coming-of-age period piece and hand-wringing domestic drama with the grace of a pantomime horse at a black-tie buffet.