Haunting visions, chills ... and all just the right side of hammy

PAUL HOPKINS isn’t much of a detective inspector. Girlfriend Helen ( Myanna Buring) tells him that she’s pregnant, even though they haven’t been trying for a baby.

She delayed telling him for as long as she could. Now she’s started getting mysterious voicemails on her phone, and sneaking out of bed in the small hours to listen to them.

What would Sherlock Holmes conclude, or Inspector Morse? Frankly, a Keystone Kop could decode those clues. We don’t need a forensics expert to prove Hopkins (Ben Batt) isn’t the father.

Fortunately, he isn’t the chief investigator of the new, four-part crime drama In The Dark (BBC1), about the hunt for a killer who abducts two teenage girls in a Derbyshire village.

Helen is a detective, too, and, though the case is based far from her city beat, she’s sent in because she’s a local girl and the chief suspect’s wife was her best friend at school.

That’s hardly real- life police procedure. Elsewhere, the drama is not a stickler for factual accuracy — when the suspect is first remanded for trial, unlike in real life there’s a full jury in court to hear the charges read.

Meanwhile, the local paper is implausibly breaking contempt laws with headlines that practically say, ‘Forget the trial, just hang him now’.

But the show is more than watchable because it gets the basics right.

The crime is heinous, the atmosphere dark, and Buring has a gift for projecting silent inner panic. Whether in this serial or in the bloodthirsty BBC2 cult drama Ripper Street, the actress’s stress can tie your stomach in knots.

There’s also a supernatural touch, as she is haunted by visions of her teenage self and the memory of Something Horrid she witnessed at 13 — a bit hammy, but it stops short of being ridiculous.

In The Dark also scores well because it doesn’t portray the police as venal, greedy idiots, like ITV’s inane Scottish thriller The Loch, or as repressive forces of a fascist state, as the moronic Fearless does.

Some of Helen’s colleagues are jobsworths, it’s true, and some are lazily ambitious. Some are walking cliches, such as the foppish pathologist who looks like he’s dressed in Laurence LlewelynBowen’s cast-offs.

But they are balanced out by a pleasing array of believable murder suspects.

There’s a boring cabbie, making unexplained forays into the woods, and an affable publican, who seems to know all about the victim’s tattoos. Creepiest of all is the monosyllabic teenage son of the chief suspect, who might have planted incriminating porn onto his dad’s laptop.

The tensest moment of last night’s TV, though, came in The Yorkshire Dales And The Lakes (More4), a compendium of clips about life in some of Britain’s most ruggedly beautiful landscapes. The mountain rescue squad was called in to save a spaniel puppy called Ailsa that had tumbled into a 50ft sinkhole on the Wensleydale moors.

As night fell, potholer Pete Roe was lowered into the crevice to find the terrified dog, which had somehow survived unhurt.

The first scenes of the rescue were screened at the start of the hour-long documentary, and the nailbiting conclusion withheld to the end. We sat patiently through sections on fell-running and furniture restoration, which did not address the question — was Ailsa OK?

Thankfully, she emerged to safety and a warm blanket. For goodness sake, watch where you’re putting your paws in future, Ailsa.