Parents’ bribe and gloom

ONE of the first things we notice about Sam and Manny, the couple played by Jill Halfpenny and Babou Ceesay in new drama DARK

MONEY (BBC1, 9pm), is they have an awfully nice house.

Vast and airy, it has a huge garden, a luxury kitchen and even its own indoor pool.As the story begins, that’s where their son Isaac (Max Fincham) is messing about with his mates.

But it soon becomes clear it hasn’t always been this way. In a flashback to a year before we find the family living in altogether more modest surroundings. They’re

struggling to make ends meet, Manny is being chased for unpaid parking fines and the freezer has chosen to break down slap-bang in the middle of a family party. Typical.

Such money worries, however, can’t entirely sour the mood, because things are looking up.

This party is to celebrate young Isaac’s return from Hollywood, where his role in a new sci-fi blockbuster has seen him feted as the movie industry’s latest child star.

Better times are just around the corner, it seems.

And yet something hasn’t felt right. From the moment Manny has picked him up from the airport, Isaac has been strangely subdued. And this surprise party is the last thing he can face.

At the first opportunity he dashes up to his room, shuts the door and breaks down in tears.

It’s there his puzzled parents find him a few minutes later.And it’s there that he finally breaks down and reveals the nightmare he’s actually been through, repeatedly sexually abused by the film’s producer.

Words cannot begin to describe Sam and Manny’s horror. But while Manny vows: “I won’t let him get away with it,” do they really stand any chance of bringing Isaac’s super-rich abuser to justice?

Or, if they’re to put this hell behind them, should they accept a huge pay-off that’s about to be offered – and agree never to raise these “allegations” again?

Elsewhere, in THE HONEST SUPERMARKET: WHAT’S REALLY IN OUR FOOD? (BBC2, 9.30pm) host Hannah Fry and her team set up a store where every item is labelled with honesty in mind.

Hence, for example, hot dogs carry the words “mechanically labelled meat with added e-numbers”, a cherry pie’s box bears a sticker saying “contributes to the destruction of the rainforest” and the preservative ingredients within a pizza will, says its packaging, “lengthen its life but may shorten yours”.

It’s an exercise designed to open our eyes to what we’re really consuming.

And I must say it’s fantastically BBC. By which I mean it’s both informative and insufferably smug.