A cartoonish caper with the gleeful violence of classic Looney Tunes

Manipulative Max, the corrupt lawyer played with deadpan aplomb by Mark Bonnar in Guilt (BBC2), is starting to remind me of Wile e. Coyote.

tricked, tripped, flattened, turned inside-out and confronted with certain death so many times, he can barely muster a shrug of surprise.

When he and his gullible brother Jake (Jamie Sives) were shoved through an airport doorway expecting to see a taxi rank, and instead found themselves surrounded by thugs, i felt a cartoonish glee at the violence that would surely follow.

it was as though Max had run full pelt off a cliff and was hanging in empty air, waiting for gravity to catch up with him.

Gravity didn’t disappoint. Moments later, Max and Jamie were being interrogated by their worst enemy, gangland boss Maggie (phyllis logan), and about to be murdered with a cattle stun gun.

like the sort of contraptions Wile e. tries to use on the Road Runner, this one had to be assembled and charged before use. the only thing missing was the acme Corporation packaging.

those classic looney toons are just a few minutes long. the genius of Guilt, written by neil Forsyth, is that it takes their explosive comedy and scatters it across a much longer, darker series of episodes.

We’re constantly waiting for the next burst of energy and mayhem, and always confident that somehow the brothers will survive... usually without their dignity, however hard Max strives to maintain it.

and we’re willing to accept improbable plot twists, such as the return from the dead of edinburgh’s Godfather, Roy lynch (Stuart Bowman).

the cartoonish element is heightened by director patrick Harkins’s style of filming, which mimics teen comic books. the action opened with an assassin in a tracksuit, emerging from the shadows wearing an outsize furry cat’s head.

When her antique revolver failed to fire, she led a chase through a highrise concrete estate before standing in silhouette on top of a tower block, like Catwoman, to watch a man being thrown to his death.

not all the drama is visual. there’s detail in the script too — such as the way Max mocks his brother’s girlfriend, calling her Yoko, as though she’s the only reason he and Jake don’t get on. When ‘Yoko’ takes her vengeance, stealing their money and betraying them both to the police, Max is almost amused. He’s Wile e. Coyote . . . what else did he suppose was going to happen?

There’s nothing cartoonish, but more than a hint of unintentional Carry On Killing, about the 1970s detective mystery Dalgliesh (Ch5), starring Bertie Carvel as p.D. James’s poetical policeman.

DCI adam Dalgliesh is investigating the murder of a forensic scientist who was nursing an unrequited love for the village vamp, Domenica, played by Margaret Clunie.

lounging on a sofa, Domenica smouldered so hard at the impassive sleuth that she seemed about to go full Fenella Fielding and ask, ‘Do you mind if i smoke?’ — before bursting into flames.

Dalgliesh is static and stagey, a series of question-and-answer scenes connected by shots of the detective zipping through the norfolk scenery in his e-type. But it’s a glossy production with a superior cast, including Deborah Findlay as a snooty housekeeper and Carolina Main as a resentful poor relation.

We’re required to accept that Dalgliesh is brilliant because he writes poetry, and Carvel’s subdued performance adds little to that. the way is open for his sidekick, DS Kate Miskin (Carlyss peer), to steal the show, and she’s working hard at it with her abrasive, hard-nosed interview style.

that’s a lot more entertaining than listening to the DCi reading aloud at literary evenings.