Single Father (certified spoiler-lite)

Don't worry, when I'm not in "grief" make-up these eye-bags disappear.

Before we begin, I should assure you that while I may be biased in favour of David Tennant, I am not insane. I couldn't sit through the dreadful Secret Smile ("whaaat?") and I haven't even attempted St Trinians 2. So you can trust me when I tell you that Secret Father, for all that it looked like being a hideous TV film of the week-style melodrama, was actually very good.

The idea is this: ludicrously fertile photographer David Tennant's wife dies in an elegantly-filmed slow-motion collision between her bicycle and a police car, and he is left to bring up their three children, plus one from his previous relationship and one from hers, with various interfering family members, ex-wives and nubile blonde primary school teachers (Suranne Jones) for help / hindrance. Tennant gets to grieve, and be saintly, and not so saintly, and get his kit off, and in an astonishing achievement from the people in make-up look pasty and gaunt and out-sexied by silver fox rival Rupert Graves, who is richer, and whose wife is not dead but French.

Obviously this series was riddled with potential perils. The key and most obvious bullet dodged was in the casting of the kids, who far from being cloyingly cute were surprisingly realistic and annoying in the way real kids are. The most astonishing (and adorable) was little Evie, played by Millie Innes, whose brilliantly convincing performance is only partly explained by the fact that the tiny actress is actually 10 years old. The most significant child plot-wise was 15-year-old Lucy (Natasha Watson) who looked like an actual 15-year-old, not a stage school siren, all skinny gangly limbs, braces and hangdog expression, veering from grown-up to childish in an instant. Plus many of the child-centred scenes turned on recognisable everyday annoyances (nobody wants to eat toast, everybody's got nits) and there was nary a door-slamming "I HATE YOU and you're NOT MY REAL DAD and I WISH MUM WAS HERE" scene to be had.

The other risk avoided was that none of the characters was too nasty or too nice. Tennant neglected his eldest daughter and lost his rag with the rest of the kids enough not to be a super-dad, dead wife's sister Anna was a pain in the bum but came through in the end, Jones's boyfriend was a prick but not a monster, Graves was obnoxiously arrogant but not an ogre, and so on. Even the dead wife had some bitch-like tendencies hidden away. Jones was maybe a little too angelic, but then banging your dead mate's bloke behind your boyfriend's back takes the edge off that a bit. And Anna's solicitor husband Mark Heap [not Eldon, as I wrote in first draft - thanks for the spot, Medium Rob!] was a touch too Mark Heap for my tastes - I'm bumbling! I'm warm-hearted! I like dogs! - but that probably depends on your pre-existing feelings about Mark Heap and whether you watch 'Lark Rise to Candleford'. The dialogue and direction were pleasingly naturalistic which helped the characters come across as believable human beings, by no means a given, even in good TV drama.

The story steered a well-judged course between the predictable and the surprising without veering too far into implausible - I certainly hadn't anticipated the direction that the "looking for Lucy's real dad" storyline would take, and there was a nice trail of false leads over how the Tennant / Jones romance would finally come out. Personally the final revelation was one step too far for me, but I suppose it was in keeping with the rest of the show. Actually the plot was probably the least interesting thing about the programme - my main enjoyment came from watching the interactions between the various characters and I didn't really care that much where it was all heading. This was a by-product, I suppose, of it being fairly underplayed, which I liked - overall it was far less sentimental than I expected, so that even if I did spend the entire first episode sobbing, I didn't feel I had been cynically manipulated into it a la Titanic / Beaches / etc.

Just one thing - was I alone is spending the bulk of the series wondering about property prices in Glasgow versus salaries of jobbing photographers / primary school teachers? David Tennant spends much of the time within his huge several-storied stone house with its own driveway and large mature garden alluding to how poor he is, before nipping over to his teacher girlfriend's exquisite architect-designed single storied wood and glass clad home for a spot of afternoon delight. I mean, I know he drives a Volvo, but come ON.

(Oh and just one other thing - anybody else from the DT-nerd sorority notice that the 'looking at camera on haybales' publicity still used in the press release was not actually from the series at all?)