Compulsion, Monday 9pm, ITV1

Posted by Stewart Turner

It was based on a 17th century Jacobean tragedy called The Changeling, but for all its highbrow literary pretentions, ITV’s glossy Bank Holiday drama Compulsion may as well have been based on an one of the more over-the-top episodes of '80s schlock-soap Dynasty, perhaps with a bit of Band of Gold thrown in for good measure.

The Dynasty element was all beautiful people slurping Bollinger in bed and spewing forth the kind of dialogue which only ever happens on the telly, while the latter was taken care of by the ever-phlegmy Ray Winstone cleverly referencing Spinal Tap’s seminal Smell the Glove album with a lady of ill repute in the back of his boss’s Rolls Royce.

ER and Bend It Like Beckham star Parminder Nagra played Anjika Indrani, a loaded little madam fresh out of Cambridge who enjoyed all the privileges life can offer - except the opportunity to choose her own husband. When her dad Satvik tried to fix her up with the son of a business associate, his creepy, glove-sniffing chauffeur Harry Flowers (Winstone) offered to sort things out if Anjika agreed to a night of passion at the local Travelodge.

Flying in the face of frankly incredulous odds, she did - and even started to get all hot under the collar at the thought of a roll in the hay with Flowers, a borderline obese member of the dirty mac brigade, and when things spiralled inevitably out of control, he eventually sacrificed himself so she could extricate herself from the whole sordid mess and marry her drippy boyfriend from university.

Winstone and Nagra made a decent enough job of it all, but having to work with a script that was awful at best and toe-curlingly ham-fisted at worst, they were always going to have trouble stopping Compulsion from lapsing into high farce.

“I want you to be nice for me,” Ray rasped to poor Parminder when he first put his proposition to her from the front of his Roller. “I can’t do this anymore,” she gasped later on in the show, referring to the aftermath of Flowers undeniably impressive neck-snapping manoeuvre on her disgruntled former fiancé, before adding breathlessly: “I want you inside me.” Oh please.

Other notable moments included an utterly inept nightclub scene featuring some of the worst extras ever to claim their free sandwiches, dancing in a style unseen since Ready Steady Go was last on air, and Vincent Ebrahim's on-screen struggle not to lurch into character as his better known guise “the dad off The Kumars at No. 42”.

Despite all this nonsense, I'll have to own up to being gripped by Compulsion to the end, albeit because it worked on some accidental level as a comedy. A shame, because somewhere deep within all this nonsense was a half-decent drama waiting to crawl its way out.