TV review Less Trainspotting, more Brideshead with heroin

GLASGOW can be a grim old broad at times, but my goodness she scrubbed up well in Patrick Melrose (Sky Atlantic, Sunday). Between the city streets standing in for gridlocked Manhattan and Rogano posing as a Fifth Avenue restaurant, the place was looking good and feeling groovy.

But then almost everything was glam in this adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novels. Patrick, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a drug addict descending to the depths of wretchedness. But being from the top drawer of society and having a bob or two, his benders took place in luxury hotel suites. Forget Trainspotting and think Brideshead with heroin.

Sounds ghastly, but the novels and this adaptation are savagely funny, elegant and heartbreakingly tender. As we saw Patrick venture to New York to pick up the ashes of his father, the screenplay by David Nicholls hinted in flashback at what made him such a grade-A screw-up. The author of One Day must have had a tough job squeezing the five novels into five one-hour dramas, but on the evidence of this first one devotees will not be disappointed. Cumberbatch, a producer on the show, was never off the screen. You won’t begrudge him a minute, though. While at first seeming to play Patrick like Sherlock on crack cocaine, he soon showed the full range of his acting chops.

Being a wholesome sort, your reviewer has never dropped acid, as I believe the young folk say, but one imagines the experience is not a million miles away from watching Midsomer Murders (STV, Sunday, 9pm), the crime drama set in a fictional English county with a murder rate straight outta Compton.

The main victim had been on a Jane

In the new Sky Atlantic drama, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Patrick Melrose, a drug addict from the top drawer of life