The last visit was dire — but this will lure you back to Broadchurch

BROADCHURCH (ITV) has a lot of damage to repair if it is to win back fans. The reputation won for its superb start, about the aftermath of a child’s murder in a seaside town, was obliterated by a dire second series two years ago.

Once viewers have given up on a drama, luring them back is doubly difficult. And writer Chris Chibnall did a thorough job of wrecking his own show in 2015, with a toecurling courtroom plot that bore no resemblance to the British legal system.

So in the opening scenes of the new story, Broadchurch could afford no more clangers. Inevitably, it dropped one straight away.

Detectives Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller (David Tennant and Olivia Colman) were called out to bring a woman reporting a rape to the police station.

When they found her, the back of her neck was crusted in blood, her face was scratched and bruised, and she had ligature marks around her arms. Her attacker had bludgeoned her unconscious, she said.

You’d expect the first thing any copper would do is radio for an ambulance. Even if this poor woman didn’t have a fractured skull or internal bleeding, she could

BLOW-OUT OF THE NIGHT: The gluttons at the all-you-can eat restaurants in The 2,000,000 Calorie Buffet (C4) were gorging on 8lb hotdogs and gallons of chili beef ... all on one plate. Just watching was enough to give you indigestion.

well be suffering from concussion. All Hardy and Miller did was look at her sadly, and cry a little bit, and then take some DNA swabs before driving her home.

Chibnall claims a team of expolice officers and trauma counsellors have underpinned the research on this story. But this was a worrying start.

What Broadchurch does have is a stupendous cast. The rape victim is Julie Hesmondhalgh (Hayley Cropper from Coronation Street), who said next to nothing and yet left us convinced that she had suffered a far worse ordeal than the police yet suspect.

Sarah Parish was her false best friend, with a fixed smile that showed every tooth — all the better for lying through, my dear. And Lenny Henry appeared for one fragment of a scene, and made it count.

Tennant and Colman could not be bettered either. Last time out they looked unsure and halfhearted, as if both suspected that revisiting Broadchurch was a mistake. This time, they are determined to wipe away that failure. Acting of such intensity is a rare sight.

This drama could be a disaster again — but the cast will do everything possible to turn it into a triumph. And that makes Broadchurch III too intriguing to miss.

Meet The Lords (BBC2) was not so much intriguing as astonishing. The Queen has often warned against cameras: ‘They let daylight in upon the magic,’ she says.

Letting daylight in upon the House of Lords is dangerous, because the denizens might all crumble into dust.

Most of them are ancient relics, and more than a few resemble the vampire undead: it was notable how few mirrors there are to be seen in the Upper Chamber.

Tory peer Michael Dobbs made a good case for the Lords as a ‘compost heap’ where new laws go to be matured or perhaps rot away altogether. But Lord Dobbs devised House Of Cards and the dastardly Chief Whip Francis Urquhart, so we can’t believe a word he says.

Hereditary peer Lord Palmer likened it to ‘being at school — you get given a locker and a clothes peg’. The dining hall did look like a public school refectory, crammed with 90-year-old third formers quaffing claret.

All quite mad, and yet the most civilised government in the world. Amazing.