Fine performances are wasted on a script that tries too hard to be "relevant" Criminal Justice BBC1

Thanks to its title, I was dreading Criminal Justice (30 June to 4 July, 9pm) even before I'd put myself through the first episode. Do you see what they did there? Criminal Justice - this is a series about justice that is criminal. For Peter Moffat, its writer, it wasn't enough to cook up a drama that was compelling. He had to score points, too: in this case, about the rotting of our system.

As regular readers will know, I get mighty fed up with the concept of "relevance" because, usually, it feels so plodding and didactic. The experience of watching such television is akin to that of being accosted by a charity fundraiser in your local high street, which is why the writer's mantra should be: art first, relevance later. But it also smacks of complacency. Creating a drama that is gripping - truly exciting and compulsive - is so very much more difficult than mustering a few feeble nods in the direction of contemporary issues, a fact that most scriptwriters would do well to remember. Plot: remember that old concept, guys?

To deal with the good stuff first. A fantastic cast, everyone at the top of their game. Pete Postlethwaite as an old lag and Bill Paterson as an old-school cop were both predictably excellent, and I loved Con O'Neill's performance as the seedy but uncynical solicitor Ralph Stone; at moments of triumph, he looked like a rat that had successfully chewed its way through a mains wire. Then there was Ben Whishaw as Ben Coulter, the university dropout who woke up after a particularly outré one-night stand to find his partner dead of a knife wound to the heart.

Whishaw put in such a magnificently true performance that I am now minded to do a U-turn on my boycott of the forthcoming film of Brideshead (he plays Sebastian Flyte). Twitchy, bewildered, exhausted, afraid, brave, cowardly: there is nothing he cannot do, and who cares if he looks a bit like a weasel crossed with a sooty pipe-cleaner?

Scheduling a series to run on five consecutive nights is either lily-livered ("Our only hope is just to keep it coming!") or overly confident ("This is so good we should just keep it coming!"), depending on your point of view. But either way, Whishaw was the best reason to stick with it; the plot, such as it was, twisted with all the confidence of a creaky pensioner.

More problematic, however, was the script, which was weirdly clunky, given that Moffat is not only an ex-barrister, but one with writerly form (he wrote North Square, the excellent Channel 4 legal drama). Far too often, it felt as if characters were explaining rather than talking: here are the rules, and here's how I - the maverick - break them. In particular, Paterson's cop, Harry Box, had a poetic way of speaking that was strangely at odds with the quotidian grind of police procedure. Moffat's impulse for writing such declamatory dialogue seemed to be a desire to reveal that justice is like some Kafkaesque literary competition. As Stone explained to Coulter, "the best story wins", irrespective of whether or not it is true.

But don't we all know this? The salutary activities of the appeal courts have long since permeated the national consciousness. And how to explain all the dramatic clichés? At first, I was impressed by the glimpse Moffat gave us of prison life: its many small humiliations, its unfathomable - to the newcomer - internal mechanisms. But then Ben asked to be removed to the "nonce" wing for his own safety, and found himself sharing a cell with a paedophile; at which point our writer duly exchanged his pen for a trowel.

The child murderer started muttering about how much he had loved his victim, and how he had said goodbye to her with eight yellow roses. My mother, sitting next to me at this point, snorted and said: "One for each year of her life." Two seconds later, this was exactly the line that our sibilant pervert delivered. Ye gods. Wanting to know what was going to happen to the possibly innocent Coulter - and, as I write, we still don't know whether he is going down - could never mitigate in favour of a line as hoary as that. May I now rest my case?

Pick of the week

6 July, 9pm, BBC2
The Conspiracy Files: 9/11Debunking the myth about the World Trade Center 7 building.

8 July, 9pm, BBC1
Bonekickers
Preposterous archaeology drama - sort of CSI meets Time Team.

10 July, 9.30pm, BBC2
Lab Rats
Loser comedy written by/starring Chris Addison, of The Thick of It.

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