Rellik (BBC1) Liar Tin Star (STV) (Sky Atlantic)

On Monday night, the writing team of brothers Jack and Harry Williams, who gave us the highly successful child abduction thriller The Missing, had two new primetime dramas competing against each other on BBC1 and STV.

The BBC’s offering was Rellik, not because the Williams boys couldn’t spell relic, but because the title is killer spelt backwards in keeping with the device employed by the writers that involved a lot of rewinding of tape as the story unfolded from the end to the beginning instead of in the more conventional order.

Every time I started to make sense of what I was watching everybody started walking backwards and jolted me out of the story once more. And that’s a pity because I’m convinced Rellik is strong enough to succeed without this irritating gimmick.

The main plot involves a serial killer who has been throwing acid in the faces of his victims. In the opening sequence a police sniper blows a hole in the chief suspect as he approaches a school. The dead man was only reaching for his mobile phone but the sniper thought he had a gun.

Watching this unfold is DCI Gabriel Markham (Richard Dormer), who fell victim to the acid killer at an earlier stage in the investigation and is now hideously scarred. Gabriel isn’t convinced that they got the right man. He believes that a woman, who had suffered an acid attack similar to his own, is wreaking vengeance on the public at large.

We know that the man who was shot only killed when he had a gun pointed at his head. Who was pointing the gun?

Meanwhile Gabriel is enjoying a torrid affair with his beautiful, young partner Elaine (Jodi Balfour) much to his wife’s chagrin. He struggles manfully to break off the affair, but with little success. Elsewhere in the cop shop, two gay officers are going through a bad patch. And there’s a wacky psychiatrist with an extreme case of OCD.

There’s plenty to keep the interest, and some of the performances are excellent. Dormer is superb as the angst-ridden Gabriel, but I have a terrible feeling that all his effort, including hours spent every day in the make-up department, will prove to have been in vain, thanks to that rewinding nonsense. T he Williams’ STV show, Liar, has a much more traditional format. On the rebound from the break-up of her relationship with her policeman boyfriend, who, incidentally, has been seeing her sister on the sly (all the Williams’ cops have tangled love lives, you notice) teacher Laura dates dishy, widowed surgeon Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd).

He walks her home and bids her goodnight at the door. She’s obviously not the sort of girl to go any further on a first date. When he claims that his phone’s battery is flat and he can’t call a cab, she invites him in to her flat and produces a bottle of wine. That’s pretty much all she can remember until she wakes up the following morning, convinced that she has been raped.

Andrew is arrested at his work, but claims that the sex was consensual. Laura insists that he must have drugged her. When no drugs are found in her system and she doesn’t have any physical injuries, it looks as if it’s just going to come down to her word against his.

She recruits her ex-boyfriend cop to do some digging into Andrew’s past, and posts an accusatory message on the surgeon’s public profile.

It’s an intriguing story, but the outcome is hardly in doubt. I’ll bet a pound to a penny that Andrew is as guilty as sin. I can’t see anyone commissioning a sixpart series about a woman making a false allegation of rape.

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f you want a real thriller and you have access to Sky Atlantic then Tin Star is just the job. Featuring Tim Roth as former London cop, Jim Worth, who has moved to a quiet Canadian town to take the post of sheriff, it starts off slowly enough, but it isn’t long before the sparks begin to fly. Jim’s new hometown has been more or less taken over by North Stream Oil, a huge conglomerate that has built a refinery on the outskirts of town.

When Jim voices his objections to the ensuing rise in crime he gets the oil company’s back up. In retaliation they send gunmen to attack Jim and his family. A terrible tragedy results from the attack. In the final scene Jim peels off his shirt to reveal a very menacing tattoo. I feel that the oil company’s bosses have awoken a sleeping giant.

Tin Star is just what it says on the tin – a modern Western with the hero up against oil barons instead of cattle barons, a theme found in classics such as Shane and The Big Country. Fill your boots. It promises to be one heck of a ride.