Cheat, STV

In a pub scene midway through Cheat, a drama banded over four nights last week, two of the principals met for an evening of drinking that ended in some ill-advised late-night sexting (is there any other kind?). Playing in the background, meanwhile, was a song that neatly summed up the growing air of menace generated by writer Gaby Hull and director Louise Hooper in this skilfully-handled thriller: Psycho Killer by Talking Heads.

The first victim was a cat – Betsy, who had belonged to university lecturer Leah Dale (Katherine Kelly) and her academic husband Adam (Tom Goodman-Hill). The second was Adam himself, seen on a mortuary slab in the flash-forward which ended the first episode, an instalment that opened with Leah and her former student Rose Vaughan (Molly Windsor) sitting on either side of a prison screen but trickily shot so the viewer couldn’t tell which woman was the inmate and which one the visitor. Even when it did finally become clear there were further twists to come. The setting was the fictitious St Helen’s College and, though it was never stated, we were presumably in either Oxford or Cambridge. Either way it was high summer, and the chosen mode of transport was the bicycle.

The cheat of the title appeared at first to be Rose, accused by Leah of lifting passages in her dissertation from a source other than her own brain. But as the rift between the women grew and became more sinister, other cheats and other acts of cheating began to float to the surface. Soon both Adam and Leah’s professor father Michael (Peter Firth) were outed, and as they were all manner of family secrets began to be uncovered. So as well as being a drama about retribution, manipulation and responsibility, Cheat was also about power and male vanity. Mostly you were left pitying the women, primarily Leah and her mother Angela (Lorraine Ashbourne) but also Rose who – spoiler alert! – was the one eating prison food in the closing scenes.

Cheat wasn’t without its missteps. A scene in which Adam smugly patted his wife’s hand during a visit to a fertility clinic only to be told it was him who was firing blanks felt cliched, and the strange hold Rose had over creepy college porter Ben (Burn Gorman) was never explained. But it left you wanting more from the pen of newcomer Gaby Hull – and suggested that we may see more of Rose and Leah, whose emotional entanglement had begun to take on an intriguing John Luther/Alice Morgan feel by the time the closing titles ran.