Tell my next of kin that I’ll die laughing if this thriller gets sillier

Another hour-long episode of Next Of Kin (ItV) flailed by, and I was still struggling to make any sense of what we were supposed to be watching.

It all seemed so horribly muddled. Was this a drama about terrorism, a study of a multicultural marriage in crisis, or a Spooks-style spy fantasy?

I still haven’t figured out what hero Guy harcourt (Jack Davenport) is meant to do for a living. he certainly never seems to go to work — but all the MI5 agents treat him like a superior officer.

It’s a mystery that while his lah-didah mother hosts opera recitals and talks like Princess Margaret, Guy has a rough-and-tough Sarf Larnden twang.

And it’s no less of a mystery that when his Pakistan-born wife Mona (Archie Panjabi) flew to Lahore to identify the body of her murdered brother, all the locals she met insisted on speaking english with Goodness Gracious Me accents.

So much in next of Kin is simply bizarre — like the photo of young Mona, supposedly taken in Pakistan, with a mountain backdrop. It looked like it had been faked by a five-year-old with a cheap app.

For 45 minutes I was asking myself: ‘Is this show really rubbish or am I missing the point?’ And then the secret agents turned up in Lahore, wearing sunglasses and smart-casual suits like Crockett and tubbs from Miami Vice.

Mystery solved! next of Kin is actually a surreal sitcom.

Crockett and tubbs were chasing Mona. Back in London, ‘M’ (Claire Skinner, the mum from outnumbered) was in a state-of-the-art underground incident room, issuing urgent instructions to her agents on the Pakistan backstreets.

they spotted Mona on a rooftop, embracing her nephew — a terrorist suspect. Crockett and tubbs, who had apparently never seen people hugging before, told ‘M’ that the duo were fighting. ‘take action!’ said ‘M’.

Crockett, or it might have been tubbs, pulled a pistol and from long range took a potshot at the terrorist nephew. he hit Mona instead. She collapsed quietly. the terrorist nephew rolled his eyes, as if to say, ‘What? Again? that’s the third time this morning!’ and ran away.

By this time, you’d have to be an inhuman brute not to be crying tears of laughter. Back in england, someone asked Guy what was going on. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I do not know.’ he sounded like he meant it.

Penelope Keith had a much clearer idea of the scheduled activities in Village Of The Year (C4), her afternoon quest to discover Britain’s rural jewels.

there was tai chi on the beach at dawn in Charmouth, Dorset; a tug-of-war before lunch beside the river Wye in redbrook, Gloucestershire; re-enactments on the green between Vikings and Saxons in the afternoon at Lydford, Devon; and story-telling before bed under the thatched roof of an Iron Age roundhouse in Aberdaron, Gwynedd.

that’s a full agenda, just the ticket for a proper holiday with no shilly-shallying, and exactly what you’d expect from the headmistressly Dame Penelope.

She didn’t seem too interested in the picturesque landscapes, but Charmouth’s volunteer firemen certainly drew her attention and a few direct questions quickly revealed which ones were single.

It was the burly chaps in chainmail costume, though, waving broadswords and axes, who really got her heart fluttering.

‘these men are so tough,’ she gasped, ‘they eat their cream teas standing up.’ She hasn’t changed since the Good Life days when she’d give richard Briers the eye over the garden fence. Margo, really!