How to rescue a failing show? Send for nerdy Gareth from The Office

Of common occurrence, says the dictionary. frequent, abundant, customary, usual. That’s what ‘ordinary’ means. But the definition has hardly applied to the lies in Ordinary Lies (BBc1) — until now.

The previous four parts of this drama serial would have been better titled Ludicrous Lies, or Incredible fabrications. We’ve seen a car salesman tell his colleagues his wife has died, because it was easier than admitting he’d overslept and was late for work again.

And then there was the woman who started giving away money, because she’d seen a bloke getting beaten up, while she was in a stranger’s house having sex with her estate agent boyfriend, even though she was happily married. Well, that seemed to be the plot.

Stories like that bear no relation to reality. At least the other episodes were halfway credible, since they’d been lifted from newspaper headlines — a sleazy Jack-the-Lad having sex with his boss’s daughter, and two greedy office girls getting caught with a stomach-full of smuggled cocaine in South America.

There’s nothing ordinary about this, though. Have you ever known anyone who told lies like those?

The show seemed past salvaging, until mackenzie crook took his turn and made it all shockingly believable. Partly that’s because his story was about debt and infidelity, the stuff of everyday tragedy. But mostly it’s because crook was superb.

He’s got a face like a Dickens character, born to play fagin or Uriah Heap — even his own name sounds like it was invented by a 19th-century novelist.

Since he first became famous as nerdy Gareth in The office, directors have been quick to typecast him in weaselly villainous roles. With parts in Pirates of The caribbean and Game of Thrones, crook can hardly have been complaining.

But he’s much more than a stock knave. As his sitcom Detectorists revealed, he has a gift for comic characters who are not clowns, pathetic but not grotesque, clutching their last shreds of dignity.

Detectorists, which he wrote, directed and starred in last year, has been nominated for a comedy Bafta. His character Andy soaked up punishment like a whipped dog, flinching and cringing but always slinking back for more.

He absorbed many more blows as Pete, the salesman with a second family in ordinary Lies, but his performance delivered a harder edge. This was not a soft man: he was a gambling addict, hiding the existence of his seven-year- old son by another woman from his wife, who had suffered a series of miscarriages and was desperate for a baby.

The plot veered towards melo- drama, when Pete staged a car robbery and took a beating to repay some debts. But the sequences that made this story ring true were far subtler — when he sat in his car opening letters from loan companies, or when he stood in the hall, making up his mind what lies to tell his wife when he walked into the kitchen.

Documentary- maker Stacey Dooley presents the same mixture of softness and steel in her drugbusting TV reports.

Ecstasy Wars: Stacey Dooley Investigates (BBc3) took her to cambodia, where loggers were tearing down the rainforest to harvest the chemicals needed for drug labs, and then to Vancouver where the pills were made.

Wherever she went, she charmed everyone. There’s a sweet naivety about her: she’s 28 but looks five years younger, and behaves as if she thinks she’s making a travelogue or a music show.

When she rode pillion on a motorbike into the jungle, in pursuit of armed gangs, she squealed like a schoolgirl, and when she walked into a ‘trap house’ or drugs supermarket in a canadian suburb, she talked to the gun-toting zombies selling heroin from behind face masks as if they were naughty 14-year-olds.

As a result, people tell her everything. She seems so harmless, so they let her watch as they counted their wads of drug money and gobbled white powder.

It’s the same technique Louis Theroux uses so well, wielding innocence like a weapon. Stacey can ask any question and make it sound ordinary. That’s a talent.