How much does British television need another drama series about a moody detective who despite his grouchy/hard-drinking/ monosyllabic exterior is an old softie underneath and will put his neck on the line in pursuit of the “troof”? Probably about as much as it needs another fatuous makeover show, anything else featuring Jade Goody or another second’s airtime devoted to Sharon Osbourne.

But then Vincent (ITV1) stars Ray Winstone and as the dog’s b******s of British acting he is always worth a look given that he can lift even the dodgiest script to semi-Bafta level. In fact a TV critic could almost get away with not watching anything he is in, merely writing “Ray Winstone was brilliant in . . . (fill in title of programme)” and going back to sleep.

There were, though, a couple of dodgy moments in the first of the new series, mainly because the writers, to make absolutely sure we’d noticed that Vincent, a grizzly private detective, is from East Lahndan (something you’d have to be deaf, blind and dead, actually, to miss), seemed to think it imperative he talk in Cockney rhyming slang.

“I got a geezer on me daily,” he growled into his phone as he walked down the street. What? Better consult my rhyming slang dictionary. Ah, here we are. “Daily” as in “Daily Mail” as in “tail”. Someone was following him! Oh, but now we’ve missed five minutes of the plot. Shouldn’t there be subtitles for this type of thing?

But I’m being picky. The storyline, about a hotel porter who is paid to confess to the murder of a chambermaid to protect the hotel owner’s daughter, was grimly imaginative and loaded with proper, seat-gripping suspense, though I don’t know how the throat-cutting scene in which the porter was murdered in prison ever passed the censors.

There was some decent dialogue too. “What ’appens if we get caught?” “We say goodbye to ar b******s” “I’m rather attached to mine — they’ve got names.” It was a bit far fetched that Vincent would be able to beat someone up and bundle them into his car boot in the middle of a busy city street without anyone intervening. Hold on — am I mad? Of course it wasn’t.

Oh, and Ray Winstone was brilliant. Can I go back to sleep?

You may have noticed that Five has been running a bizarre advertising campaign for its new digital channel Five US. You would have struggled to miss it, frankly, given that it has featured billboard posters and full-page newspaper ads asking “Who says nothing good ever came out of America?” Which is strange because, televisually-speaking anyway, no one does. Hence our channels are crammed with mega-successful US imports.

Anyway it started presumably in the way it means to go on, which seems to be mainly targeting blokey blokes with a line-up including CSI, Conviction, a new US legal drama series, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes, dramatisations of Stephen King’s short stories.

Though not a big fan of Kingor horror generally I watched the first adaptation, Battleground, with prejudice suspended because it has had rave reviews in America. It starred William Hurt as a hitman who murders a toy manufacturer but then finds himself under siege from a battalion of creepy toy soldiers. It was completely dialogue free, but, surprisingly, this enhanced rather than compromised the quality. Though the plot was preposterous, cinematically it was a triumph. Much of the camerawork was from the perspective of the miniature soldiers — a sort of sinister Toy Story blended with a war film. But by the end I was so bored I was praying for it to finish. A shoot-out scene barely interests me for 30 seconds, never mind 30 minutes. This was definitely a teenage boy’s film. Or to be more accurate, a fantasy for the male who is 40 going on 15.

I can understand why anyone would choose not to watch a documentary about the Suez crisis at the moment. Why put yourself through 60 minutes of Western occupation, oil obsession and Middle Eastern conflict when you get that on the hour every hour simply by switching on the news? But Suez (BBC Two) was worth the effort. A rich, meaty seam of archive photographs, reconstructions and interviews, including with Anthony Eden’s widow, it kicked off a cracking series which, without wanting to sound too pompous, is just the sort of thing BBC factual should be doing. Next week should be even better as we watch a British Prime Minister hellbent on pursuing an ill-advised invasion in the Middle East and seeing his popularity and career suffer for it.

Oh, but then I suppose we see that on the news every day, too. Happy déjà vu-ing.

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