The Firm (BBC Scotland, Sunday), an eight-part docuseries on Glasgow lawyer Aamer Anwar, came to an end this week. Full disclosure, I wasn’t impressed by the first episode. As I recall, the headline on the review was “Whose terrible idea was this?”

I thought the film was terrific on the legal stuff, but Suits-style shots of lawyers walking slo-mo and iffy close-ups of women in high heels were questionable to say the least.

Anyway, an email arrived from a lawyer (not Mr Anwar). Apparently I’d been too hard on the first episode - the only one made available for preview at the time - and should assess the series as a whole. So I did. And I’m still astounded by the sheer tin-eared, woefully misjudged, cheesy awfulness on display.

Later in the series, in addition to the shoe shots, there was a scene with two young women trainees being fitted for their solicitors’ gowns. If it had been two men would they have twirled in front of a mirror to Goldfrapp’s Ooh La La? I doubt it.

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This mince was sandwiched between a detailed look at the Surjit Singh Chhokar murder case, and Mr Anwar going home to Liverpool to visit his mum and talk about his childhood in revealing detail. This is what we wanted more of.

But too often The Firm came across as a puff piece, a bloated, endlessly repetitive advert for Mr Anwar. Eight hours of screen time? He’s an interesting guy, not a general election.

Most of the humour came from him and was about him. By the close whole areas remained a mystery, including how much all those salaries and that office set him back.

Right to the end, the film flipped between profoundly serious material and outright piffle. While it did not ruin the entire film, it came perilously close.

Appeal verdict: still a thumbs-down from me.

Everything was super-sized on The Couple Next Door (Channel 4, Monday-Tuesday). The houses were big, the streets wide, and the biceps on Danny the neighbour (Sam Heughan) could have cracked walnuts.

It looked like America, or maybe Australia, all that sunshine, but it turned out to be …. Leeds. As in Yorkshire. As in Last of the Summer Wine. But then nothing was as it seemed in David Allison’s suburbia-set drama, and some of it was very silly.

Danny’s muscles looked real enough. “He can lift anything,” boasted his swishy wife Becka (Jessica De Gouw) to new arrivals Evie and Pete (Eleanor Tomlinson and Alfred Enoch).

Just like that, Danny picked up a dishwasher from the removal van. The women gazed admiringly as he sauntered past in all his white goods-toting glory, emasculating Pete as he went.

Before you could say pampas grass, the two couples were having barbecues together and sharing confidences. Wonder where this is going, a nation did not wonder?

Meanwhile, neighbourhood sleazeball Alan (Hugh Dennis) spent most of his time upstairs on his computer, or taking sneaky photos of Becka in her fitness gear.

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Subtlety was not the drama’s strong point. To distract from the iffy plotting (would a criminal hire police motorcyclists to ferry goods around?), there were sex scenes aplenty. In one, Danny and Evie locked eyes as they put the bins out. It was raining, so his T-shirt was soaked. But wait, that was just a dream (yes, they even pulled that old trick).

It did not do to think too deeply about this modern morality tale. If nothing else it looked fabulous, and it was no hardship to watch the likes of Heughan and Tomlinson do their thing.

One action scene would have been right at home in Line of Duty, so that bodes well. There are high hopes, too, for Alan’s disabled wife, Jean (Kate Robbins) who spent all her time at the foot of t’stairs beckoning her husband. When last seen she was booking a date to have a stair lift installed. Watch out Alan, she’s coming for you.

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There was more racy behaviour in the documentary Julius Caesar: the Making of a Dictator (BBC2, Monday). We heard all about Caesar’s reputation as a notorious womaniser. The historian Tom Holland described him as “cool”, a dandy, and a chap who wore his toga “in a distinctive way” (I couldn’t see it myself). The actor playing him in the dramatic reconstructions looked like Mick McManus.

Rory Stewart, doing double duty as politician and academic, was not a fan. “He’s a disgrace in every single way. He’s immoral, he’s irreligious, and he’s a potential tyrant.” Stewart whipped himself into quite the lather. It was almost as if Caesar reminded him of some contemporary political foe. Who could he mean?

The historians did an excellent job of bringing a complex, character-packed tale to life. If some of the comparisons were obvious (Caesar as Trump, etc) their collective enthusiasm was infectious and made up for the low-budget, samey dramatic reconstructions. With two more episodes to go, the windows in Caesar’s world are steaming up nicely.