I was quite engaged by the first series, save for the now apparently obligatory film technique of jumping about in time.

When Eric Morecambe played the right notes but not necessarily in the right order, it was very funny and always will be. But the fashionable dissection and rearrangement of stories so that you struggle to work out what is going on, is neither funny nor clever. It appears to me to be something adopted by unimaginative story tellers who have nothing worthy up their sleeve and so mangle what is inevitably a far better story when told chronologically, for the sake of trying to look cutting edge.

That said, there were some good action scenes in the first series and a fairly decent plot. If some of the actors had been directed more robustly so that they emphasised the right words in sentences, the dialogue would have been less mechanical and more snappy and witty.

Series 2 (I am up to episode 6) is much less engaging. The writing, which was not scintillating in series 1, is now almost inane. Another current trend of throwing the F word into the mix for the sake of it (because script writers are told this is what most audience members want) rather than with good reason puts the F word into the mouths of actors who are clearly uncomfortable with using it where it is anomalous. I am giving up on it for now, but if a well regarded third series appears I might return to see how this sinking ship of a series was re-floated.