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

Payback period (ITV):

Judgement:

DNA Family Secrets (BBC2):

Judgement:

Being the scariest man on television must have its perks. It’s easy to imagine that Peter Mullan can walk into a busy restaurant, ask for the best table, and the seat will become available.

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

Mullan has cornered the market in threatening crime lords, in dramas such as Top Of The Lake (opposite Elisabeth Moss, in a performance that will 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 first episode of Payback, when no one else knew what was going on — least of all Lexie.

Mullan is corrupt Edinburgh businessman Cal Morris, the subject of a secret police operation as he attempts to transfer several million pounds in euros through a series of banks and shell companies.

Being the scariest man on television must have its perks. It’s easy to imagine that Peter Mullan can walk into a busy restaurant, ask for the best table, and the seat will become available

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

Much of the first part was about Lexie’s concerns about her children’s babysitter, and whether they were going to McDonald’s instead of the play park. But every time the plot returned to the ruthless Mr Morris and his henchman (Steven Mackintosh), the peripheral issues no longer mattered.

That’s kept us from worrying about some of the less plausible twists. Jared is fatally stabbed outside a tobacconist and as Lexie watches in tears, the paramedics attempt to revive him on the sidewalk with electric shocks from a defibrillator. I’m not a heart surgeon, but that seems like an odd treatment for a man with a knife wound through his heart.

Detectives suspect Lexie knows more about the murder than she is letting on and confront her with Jared’s credit card statements, which reveal he was having an affair and planning to leave her. Charming.

They then break into her house and plant a listening device. That would be acceptable if she were a terrorist. . . but her only transgression is that she married a man who committed suicide after buying a pack of cigarettes while claiming to have quit smoking. It hardly seems like a matter for GCHQ.

Towards the end of the hour, Lexie poured herself a mega glass of white wine and downed it as she sobbed at the kitchen table. If you can think of a TV drama this year where that scene didn’t happen, send me a postcard.

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

Stacey Dooley did more reliable detective work in DNA Family Secrets (BBC2). She doesn’t have to hide microphones in people’s homes; she is a human listening device.

All Stacey has to do is tilt her head with a sympathetic smile, and she coaxes a lifetime of repressed heartache out of her subjects.

This time she helped 77-year-old Anthony from Liverpool discover the identity of his biological father, a half-Italian American soldier who had a one-night stand with a girl he met in a dance hall during the Second World War.

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

These stories are less revealing than they once were as we grow accustomed to what DNA can reveal. The only surprise was that no one was related to a celebrity. But it’s all still quite moving.