Daily Mail

What sort of woman cares more about a cake than a terror attack?

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Frankly, Next Of Kin (ITV), a drama about a British Pakistani family embroiled in a terrorist nightmare, ran into trouble from the moment the first bomb went off.

We’d met selfless london GP Mona (archie Panjabi) and her brother, the even more saintly kareem, who ran a charity clinic in lahore.

kareem was due to fly home for a visit. Panjabi has a smile as tense and brittle as eggshell porcelain, but we could tell she was excited because she’d bought a cake. It had candles and a message in icing, and she carried it proudly up the street . . . while behind her, the sky was black with smoke from a terrorist atrocity.

Mona scarcely gave it a glance. Fire engines screamed past, crowds jostled to film the aftermath on their phones, and she kept marching homewards with the cake in her arms.

Once through the door, she ordered her siblings to switch off the TV. no one was allowed to pay the least attention to the bomb on their doorstep.

That attitude killed any sympathy we could have for the character. If she doesn’t care about her community, if she doesn’t have the slightest curiosity about people being murdered in the neighbouri­ng streets, why should we care about her?

kareem was a much more likeable chap. He risked missing his flight home to perform a lifesaving emergency op on a little girl with a pregnant mother. Then he made a dash for the airport.

Unluckily, he was kidnapped on the way and shot in the head. He won’t be stealing any more limelight from Mona and her husband (film star Jack Davenport).

We should have been on the edge of our seats, desperate to see kareem rescued. Instead he was dead and everyone else was ignoring the london bombing.

as far as this family was concerned, the biggest drama of the day came when Mona’s mum got stuck in the lift at their apartment block and had to wait half an hour to be rescued by a technician.

We’re supposed to believe that this is a loving, close-knit group. But gradually we discovered that kareem has a son at university, Danny. While his dad was away, not one of Danny’s family has bothered to see or chat to him. Fed up, the boy left for Pakistan weeks ago, and no one even noticed he was missing. I really wanted to like this show. We need brilliant dramas to help us make sense of the terrorist threat. What we don’t need is indifferen­ce.

Someone mentioned in passing that among the dead in the car bomb was the mother of two young twins. It was that family, whoever they were, that should have been at the centre of this story.

Meanwhile, the long-running forensics thriller Silent Witness ( BBC1) was back, more deranged than ever.

It exists in a parallel world where pathologis­t Dr nikki ( Emilia Fox) collects clues from murder scenes, and solves the crimes that are baffling detectives.

This time, a helpless Chief Inspector (alex Macqueen) was begging for Dr nikki’s help, to find the maniac who abducted her best friend.

Macqueen suspects another pathologis­t is a secret psycho: he implored Dr nikki to give the man a job, so she could investigat­e him.

Julian rhind-Tutt plays the suspect, all leather jacket and long hair. His phone ringtone is you Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate.

I’m betting he’s not a psycho — he’s Dr nikki’s new sidekick. Well, it’s no madder than anything else.

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