Not even Vicky McClure can save this miserable murder mystery

Without Sin ★★☆☆☆ Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah’s Witnesses And Me ★★☆☆☆

PSST! Want to know some old news? Keep it to yourself, but I can let you see a couple of last week’s headlines, wrapped around a portion of haddock and chips.

You’re not interested, of course. Who would be? And for the same reason, why would you want to watch Without Sin (ITV1)?

Yes, it stars Vicky McClure from Line Of Duty. Yes, it airs nightly at primetime all this week. But it’s been available on the streaming ITVX service for months, and that makes it yesterday’s news.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why ITV bosses are now launching their biggest shows via video-on-demand, sometimes half a year before screening them on the TV channel.

Viewers who log on to ITVX currently have the option to watch major series, as yet unaired on ITV, such as David Tennant in Litvinenko, about the murder of a Russian defector, and A Year On Planet Earth, an epic wildlife series narrated by Stephen Fry.

How many will actually do so isn’t clear, as ITV bosses don’t publish audience figures for individual shows. Occasionally, they will claim that a streaming series has ‘performed well’, though people said the same about Mae Muller, Britain’s

entry at Eurovision this year, and she came second-from-last.

All we know for sure is that, when these programmes do finally appear on ordinary TV, they feel slightly stale, like a reheated dinner.

Without Sin wasn’t exactly a banquet to begin with. McClure plays Stella, a dope-smoking taxi driver and ex-drinker, whose 14-year-old daughter Maisy was killed by a burglar while Stella was out partying and her husband Paul was bedding his boss.

Now she’s looking for ‘closure’ so she can ‘move on with her life’ — there’s so much therapy speak, you almost expect Prince Harry to have a cameo. So Stella visits the killer, Charlie Stone (Johnny Harris), in prison. Stone is a drug dealer, car thief and habitual jailbird . . . so when he tells Stella he’s innocent, she naturally believes him and sets out to investigate Maisy’s death herself.

Paul is no use — he’s a cocaine addict himself. And it turns out Maisy was stealing drugs from the local gangland family. Small wonder Stella spends most of each episode driving round in her taxi, looking moody.

McClure’s an actress who never gives less than her all, but she’s struggling here, in a straggly wig so ill-fitting that she has to wear a woolly hat to stop it from slipping over her face.

The general theme seems to be that, since everyone’s a bit to blame for Maisy’s murder, nobody really is — hence the Biblical reference in the title: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’

Bible-bashers came in for a bashing as footballer’s wife Rebekah Vardy examined the religious sect that blighted her childhood, on Jehovah’s Witnesses And Me (Ch4).

There’s no doubting her sincerity. She loathes the organisation, and with good reason: she says she was sexually abused from the age of 12 and, far from acting to prevent it, the church elders made her feel she was to blame.

But this one- off programme faced two insurmountable obstacles. Rebekah’s ordeal was partly rooted in her parents’ divorce, and she hasn’t spoken to her mother for seven years. That didn’t stop her commenting on her mum’s past love life, which seemed a one-sided and intrusive decision.

The second problem is simply that Rebekah, who sued fellow WAG Coleen Rooney last year for libel and lost, has been effectively branded a liar in court. Anything she says is worse than old news — it’s automatically discredited.