I am sick as a dog this week, so I am eschewing my usual sharp edged witticisms and incisive commentary (look, leave me my illusions) for a quick review of the first week of 2012.

Eternal Law, UTV. This isn’t going to be a new Being Human, unless it develops a lot more … meat in the next few episodes, but it was a charming and entertaining way to spend a sickly hour on Thursday evening.

One night lawyer Tom Greening makes a rough landing in a York cornfield. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, he’s flying Angel Air. Played with wide-eyed innocence and infectious joy by Ukweli Roach, Greening is an angelic chorister assigned to earth for the first time. A rookie on the beat, so to speak. This dismays his partner, veteran angel and grouch Zak Gist, Samuel West, and intrigues Tobias Menzies saturnine fallen angel Richard, ‘Is it all hands to the pump?’ Greening is too busy admiring ladybugs and stars to care.

Gist and Greening, Zak insists on that order, are lawyers. They could, a smooth and very posh voice-over informs, have been tinkers, tailors, soldiers or spies. Whatever was needed. They are in York to help anyone who needs them, ably assisted by the mysterious Miss Sherringham, Orla Brady.

It isn’t entirely clear who Miss Sherringham is, but Richard (who is obviously there to not-help people) implies that she is human. Also that he would like to get ‘jiggy jiggy’ with her, but we will forgive him that since he is the best thing in the show and evil.

The first case the angels have to deal with is that of a rooftop sniper who opened fire on a market and was caught, red-handed, by Greening. This is where one of the short-comings of the show shuffles sheepishly into view. Despite being witnesses, Greening and Gist end up as the shooter’s lawyers, and Richard is prosecuting the case. Think about it on more than the surface and the bits start to crumble. Surely Gist, and especially Greening, wouldn’t be allowed to testify? Do they even know the law? Is it just down-loaded into their heads? Whose place did Richard take, or did he possess someone already there?

Yes, their employers are God and Devil. But if they are willing to intervene that far, then why not further? Why do the angels have to pretend to be lawyers at all? What about free will?

For now, we can let it go. It was a very packed episode, maybe the details will be hammered out later.

Meanwhile, in addition to trying to clear the name of the rooftop shooter, Zak also had to deal with a ghost from his past. Hannah, Hattie Morahan, a young lawyer with some connection to his last, botched, mission. From the longing looks and angelic bath-spying, I assume it was a romantic entanglement. Something forbidden angels.

This is actually the weakest part of the storyline. It isn’t the fault of the characters or the writing, but rather the setting. I have not, personally, ever been to York. (It appears to be absolutely gorgeous) However, if their hospitals are at all like the one Hannah was rushed to after the accident I want to move there. It had rolling green lawns, everything was spotlessly white and patients not only had their own private rooms, they had huge bathrooms with posh free-standing baths that they soak in late at night.

Admittedly, patients do apparently sometimes die for no particular reason and nobody notices – not even when the angel pops in and pflashes you back to life. To be fair, it is possible the Trust spent all their funding on the baths and couldn’t hire nurses or doctors since I don’t remember seeing one.

Really, it was a very strange hospital.

At the moment the show appears to be a straight-forward legal procedural, only with angels instead of renegade blokes, spurned politicians wives or genii’ with no actual degree. It is a nice bit of fluff, but if they want to turn into a cult classic they need more grit than just a bit of tart language. They need an arc, an in-universe storyline that at least three out of five episodes contribute to. It would be easy to set up. Let’s call it The Job Protocol.

Hannah. Save her or corrupt her. Which will it be?

We know she’s going to work for Richard, so why not? Her soul is the chit, or easier to justify with a supposedly benevolent being – her future is the chit. Sometime in the future she is going to do something terribly important that will, depending on the choices made here and now, be either good or bad. So the angels, and Richard, are here to make sure she leans to their side.

If you want something to be a cult series, you have to give nerds like me a reason to speculate. That’s what we thrive on, theories.

Public Enemies, BBC.

Eddie Mottram, played by Danny Dyer-a-like Daniel Mays, has just served 10 years for murdering his girlfriend and is out on parole. His parole officer is Paula Radnor, the lovely haired Anna Friel, who has finished a suspension for inadequately supervising a parolee who went on to murder a girl. She, determined not to make the same mistake twice, is by-the-book officious in making sure that Mottram abides by the conditions of his release.

No trouble. No girls without telling them everything. No going near his victim’s family.

Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a drama if Mottram did as he was told. In short order he has bumped into Georgia, that was the poor, uncast girlfriend’s name, on the street, shagged a co-worked from the garden centre in the shower and missed a curfew. He thought that when he got parole he would be free – but it’s more like he can see freedom, without being allowed to touch it.

A three-parter, the first episode was interesting. There was something striking in watching Mottram try and fit back into a society he hardly recognised and friends who had known him before. The awkward see-saw swing between the familiarity of childhood friends and the memory of exactly what he’d done. Equally interesting was watching Radnor try to find the right balance of suspicion. She was meant to be watching him, measuring his risk, but how much was too much? How much was fair.

Then Mottram ends up yelling through her letterbox, ‘I’m innocent!’

After that, of course, it was a who-dunnit. With Mottram, Radnor and Mottram’s sister trying to convince the world of his innocence. Failing. Trying again.

It has to be said, Radnor doesn’t seem to have been a very good parole officer. She went mismanaging one case so badly that someone died and the next so badly that she ended up breaking the law by helping her parolee chase an appeal. Something that could send him back to jail. Not only that, she ended up making secret calf eyes at him while he smoked roll-ups in her car and put his feet on her dashboard.

The problem with Public Enemies was that it didn’t seem to be sure quite what it was – drama, crime, romance, whodunnit? Instead, it sort of flip-flopped between them with varying degrees of conviction. There wasn’t enough time allocated to actually craft a proper mystery so they just tagged on a random confession, the drama wobbled off once the whodunnit was introduced and the romance…

I know good girls are meant to like bad boys, but Radnor’s neat career woman going heels over tailored jacket for the crude, swearing and violent Mottram was a hard line to sell. She looked fragrant; he looked like he scratched a lot. Still, there are odder matches out there and once he is free they will have one thing in common, they are both unemployed.

Emmerdale, UTV. Christmas is the season for crying in the soaps. Babies, beatings and blow-ups. In Emmerdale most of the drama happened before Christmas, and one of the major ones was local bad-boy Cain getting three shades of shite kicked out of him on his way home from the pub. There were no shortage of suspects. Never a particularly likeable sod, Cain had spent the last six months aggravating everyone he met.

In no particular order there was:

Amy, the teenage girl he got pregnant and terrorised into having an abortion – except she didn’t – who then gave birth in a graveyard.

Val and Eric, Amy’s legal guardians

John Barton, the farmer he had cockolded.

Moira Barton, the farmers wife who he had despoiled and then revealed all to her husband just for kicks.

Jai Sharma, the local candy maker who had been the target of Cain’s brutality over the fact he was marrying Cain’s ex Charity. This included causing an accident that could have killed Jai’s parents, sleeping with Jai’s little sister and sending him a cellphone picture and killing their cat.

Charity, who really wanted to marry Jai. She is also Cain’s cousin and the father of his daughter, Debbie. (Debbie was adopted, which is why she doesn’t have the traditional biblical name. Much to the gratitude of younger Dingles, the whole family seems much more relaxed about naming now.)

I think that is pretty much everyone? There were other people in the village with reason to want him dead, but none recently. ANYHOW, Cain survived the beating and accused Jai. Who was promptly the target of a hate campaign by Cain’s large and enraged family, despite the fact none of them could stand him a week before.

(Particularly affected was Cain’s nephew Aaron, who earlier in the year helped his boyfriend, who had been paralysed the Christmas before in a train accident, commit suicide, who attacked Jai on multiple occasions. It is hard to work out the details. Aaron has always been volatile and Cain, his uncle and object of admiration, being injured has clearly dredged up a lot of old feelings.)

The only one who didn’t? Zac, Dingle patriarch and Cain’s father. Who also beat him half to death with a tire-iron. The Dingles aren’t a very functional clan sometimes.

I wasn’t the only one who called it, but call it I did! Can’t imagine they are going to send Zac to jail though, the Dingles are popular.