Secret Life, Channel 4

Roman’s Empire, BBC Two

When they come to do a Top 100 show on television’s most uncomfortable moments, and they surely will since the “most embarrassing” have already been tabulated, it will undoubtedly feature a scene from Rowan Joffe’s drama Secret Life. Charlie, a sex offender, found himself in a funfair and began to charm a 12-year-old girl over milkshakes and chips. It was excruciating to watch but powerfully brought home what the film saw as the consequences of a state system that seemed incapable of offering the support that Charlie needed not to reoffend.

Up to this point, the film had shown how Charlie, released from prison after six years for the abuse of three girls, had tried to reenter an outside world that would always see him as repugnant. The fathers of his victims chased him. His sessions with a brusque, chain-smoking trainee psychologist ended when angry protestors closed down the rehabilitation unit he was attending. Cast adrift, he began to succumb to his old urges.

As Charlie, Matthew Macfadyen — the most recent screen Darcy in Pride and Prejudice — didn’t crave our sympathy or invite demonisation. Here was a man well aware of the battles within him. Yet Joffe’s film wasn’t an apologia for paedophilia. It made clear that rehabilitation might not always be possible while arguing that the only way to keep control of sex offenders was to engage with them, not hound them out of sight. Jarring moments aside — the vigilante fathers might as well have been torch-wielding extras from an old Frankenstein movie — Joffe didn’t exploit paedophilia as the dependable dramatic power source without which countless crime thrillers and dramas would have seemed wan and exhausted.

Yet Secret Life lacked the dramatic efficacy of a film such as Little Children . That was able to take the emotional torque of child abuse — the visceral righteousness it would arouse in nearly every viewer — and twist it in a powerfully unexpected direction to make us question the pursuit of a paedophile within a community. Joffe’s film was bathed in a detached despair. I wonder how many people stayed the course to engage with issues that a documentary could have raised in a less gruelling way.

I’m sure the sitcom Roman’s Empire was a preferred viewing option, although this second episode proved that dysfunctional families don’t guarantee another Simpsons or Royle Family . Neil Dudgeon played the leisure magnate Roman Pretty, who employed his daughters’ partners so he could keep an eye on them. Jase, an Irish waster, faked his death in the hope of escaping Roman’s oldest daughter and their newborn baby. Leo, dumped by Roman’s middle daughter for a toff who mostly seems there to dance naked at inappropriate moments, feigned grief to gain her sympathy until Jase turned up at his own funeral to save his favourite bowling ball from being cremated.

This was striving for the same quickfire mix of one-liners, sight gags and flashbacks, inspired by the characters’ insensitivity and solipsism, as the US series Arrested Development and My Name is Earl . But it lacks the chaotically inspired chutzpah of those series, the sense that the writers have made every joke earn its place, and an internal crazy logic to hold it together. Even when you are throwing in the kitchen sink, you need to set aside some time to plumb it in. This simply left a trickle of stereotypical damp squibs that included Roman’s Japanese gardener swearing samurai vengeance.

Last week, Roman was seen hoping to sell East Timor as a holiday hotspot, but last night seemed unaware that Romania was a country and so inappropriate as a name for his theme park. This was lazy goldfish writing, barely remembering what had gone before for the sake of a gag and still forgetting to give Roman’s third daughter anything to justify her existence. No wonder they repeated some of last week’s flashbacks. It’s only the second episode and jokes are already being recycled in a series that feels as if it was commissioned for the nursery slopes of BBC Three but someone thought it was ready for the downhill exposure of BBC Two. It isn’t. And anyway, apart from The Good Life and The Royle Family , has there ever been a decent sitcom with a punning title?

A spooky kind of love

Unlike Doctor Who, Bill Paterson’s paranormal investigator in BBC One’s Sea of Souls can’t seem to keep his assistants for long. After different pairs in the past two series, this week’s two-parter had none. Had they all fallen foul of some evil ectoplasm? More likely, with audiences lapping up such series as Supernatural, Most Haunted, Afterlife and Ghost Whisperer, it’s because we no longer need a sceptical sidekick to be the voice of reason. Nowadays it’s all Mulder without the need of Scully.

A waste of cyberspace?

The 1998 film The Truman Show imagined a 24-hour soap with an unwitting hero but no viewer voting. Now we may be a step closer with a new website, YourTrumanShow.com. It will invite blogs and YouTube videos of people’s personal lives and then get the site’s users to rate them. So now we can all become Simon Cowells of people’s very existence. But think how awful it would be if you found out that your mum had voted you off.

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