What could be worse than a missing child? Her return

The Missing BBC One, Wednesday

Divorce Sky Atlantic, Tuesday

The Story of Skinhead BBC Four, Friday

he weather took a turn for the worse this week, the skies darkened and everyone felt a little bit more miserable – perfect timing, then, for the BBC to launch its second series of

Two years ago, the tale of a boy who vanished on a family holiday to France, and the damage his disappearance did to his parents’ lives during the next eight years, attracted eight million viewers. It was brilliant in parts – utterly gripping even if sometimes the plotting felt overly contrived – but its tone, influenced by Nordic noir, was incessantly bleak. However, it was the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse compared to this second series, which compounded the misery by showing that the return of a missing child was actually the start of a whole new descent into hell.

David Morrissey and Keeley Hawes, two actors who often seem to get put through the wringer on television, played a military couple stationed on a British base in Germany. Ten years ago, we gathered in flashback, their 11-year-old daughter Alice had been abducted. In 2014 she’d reappeared, barely alive, stumbling into the local town square and collapsing. Alice had been raped, she’d had a baby and there was a suspicion she might not even be who she said she was. The series then flashed forward to the present day and she was nowhere to be seen, her brother had swerved wildly off the rails, Dad was having an affair and Mum had got in contact with Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo).

That old super-sleuth, the French Columbo, is the one character linking series two with its predecessor. It turned out Baptiste had flown to Iraq to try to solve another long-standing missing child case. The girl he was searching for had been abducted with Alice, and so off we went, spiralling inexorably downwards.

As with the first series of The Missing, the plot didn’t so much unfurl as get thrown at you in bits. We leapt back and forth across continents and timelines in what seemed like a deliberate piece of bamboozlement.

TBut writers Harry and Jack Williams, director Ben Chanan and whichever poor soul was responsible for continuity, are exceptionally good at oiling The Missing machine. Even the inevitable contrivances where the characters have tattoos and outlandish scars to indicate whether it’s past or present is forgivable when tempered with some great performances. I shudder to think where all this is going. Equally, I suspect I won’t be able to resist going with it. The most remarkable thing about new American sitcom is that it was written by Sharon Horgan: remarkable because Horgan appears to have written every comedy on every channel in the English-speaking world this year. Channel 4 continues to air her relationships series Catastrophe as well as piloting The Circuit, a pitch-black critique of dinner parties. Meanwhile, on the BBC, her sitcom Motherland, starring Anna Maxwell Martin as a harassed parent trying to navigate the pitfalls of nappy valley, has been given a full series (hurrah!). How can Horgan have managed to be so prolific? Are there two of her, both going to endless calamitous middleclass dinner parties and hanging around school gates in the search of excruciating social humour?

Still, you can see why Horgan is on a roll: her comedy is relentless, caustic and unflinching. Even in the amply well-served market of US couples’ comedies, Horgan’s voice is as bracing as a tequila shot before the school run. In Divorce, Sarah Jessica Parker plays Frances, a stressed (though this being the ageless SJP, still immaculately primped) suburban housewife on the verge of a separation from her husband Robert (Thomas Haden Church). The implication after one episode is that it’s going to get really nasty, which, one imagines, will be prime Horgan territory.

Unfortunately, owing in large part to my distaste for her character in Sex and the City (the emotionally incontinent Carrie Bradshaw), Parker is a woman on whom I might wish a messy divorce. Whether you find an actress insufferable is of course a

I shudder to think where it is going. But I fear I won’t be able to resist going with it