FATHER & SON. ITV1 (UK), June 7 through 10, July 2010. Dougray Scott, Sophie Okonedo, Ian Hart, Stephen Rea, Reece Noi, Wunmi Mosaku, Simon Delaney. Written by Frank Deasy. Director: Brian Kirk. (Previously shown on RTÉ (Ireland), 29 June through 20 July 2009.)

   This was another of those stories spread over successive evenings that seem to be the vogue over here nowadays. This was in four parts — Monday to Thursday, one hour each, less adverts.

   Set in Manchester, a city that has acquired a small reputation for gang violence, this concerns Michael Connor, a former criminal who has retired to a new life (and a new wife) after the murder of his first wife. He returns to Manchester when his estranged teenage son — who lives with his mother’s sister, a policewoman — is arrested and accused of shooting another teenager in a gang related killing.

   The story involves several strands with a prisoner and former colleague of the father keeping an eye on the son while attempting his own escape, and the involvement, possibly criminal, of the police both in Manchester and in Ireland.

   There are some discrepancies and anomalies — would a fifteen year old, accused but not convicted of a shooting, be placed in a cell with a hardened adult criminal, and would a Manchester criminal, now living in Ireland, have an accent that ranges over most of the British Isles? — but the story twisted and turned and managed to hold my attention throughout