Last week the body-farm team had a glut of body-parts after an explosion splashed two-people-goo all over the a flat. This week they have only one, a sweaty, beige right hand with the skin rotted right off.

Don’t worry, they found the rest of the body soon enough. Buried in compost – tips for the serial killers out there, a perfect place to bury a body if you had a compost pit big enough – on the estate of a wealthy, crooked recluse – recently accused of sexual assault.

Suspects include Penton, the wealthy recluse, his unflappable right hand man, West, a couple of drug-dealers and a shady, slightly sweaty doctor.

That was it really. There wasn’t a lot of investigation and, as is becoming the show’s modus operandi, it waited until it thought no-one was looking and then took a flying leap over a gaping plot hole.

Honestly, this time you could practically see the writers passing the character a note. ‘Oy, we’ve written ourselves into a corner. Could you ask something out of the blue and make a huge, assumptive leap based on no evidence? Thanks!’

It is something that you really can’t do in a procedural show. I mean, it is bad form in any story for the joins to show so clearly. However, in a show based on the idea of an elite forensic investigative unit – they need to actually investigate. Even Sherlock, whose entire shtick is making leaps of investigative explains the logic behind his observations.

I also don’t believe that they could have been that precise about cause of death. So I don’t trust that they are elite either. So it is a show about some people with forensic qualifications making assumptions about people. As a pitch, it doesn’t grab me.
Politically informed and morally uninterested – he rolls his eyes when Rosa snippily implies he’s homophobic. ‘When I say perverted, I mean someone paying for sex. And then killing them.’However, there was one way in which this week’s episode was a considerable improvement on the first episode. The writers appear to have been told there is no point having Keith Allen on your show if you aren’t going to let him be Keith Allen. After a stolid and uninspired performance last week – serving mostly as the butt to the forensic intelligentsia’s jokes – this week’s Hale is principled, impish and self-righteously malicious.

In a series still primarily populated by CSI-stock characters, he is actually quite interesting. His frustration with the fact that his paid for experts don’t understand the difference between the facts and the truth is both understandable and entertaining.

Unfortunately, of course, he must still play second-fiddle to the forensic crew – who are considerably less interesting.

Rosa (Wumni Mosaku) and Oggy (Finlay Roberston), in particular, tend to be more a collection of useful character attributes than believable people. Rosa is supposed to be the botanist, but other than fingering a few bits of plant she spent most of her time being squishily empathic at people. This week at a young drug addict, apparently because he reminded her of her brother.

On the other hand, Oggy is an unworldly innocent – shocked and sheltered from things like drugs and roaches. He stares at the horrors that cross his desk with a mixture of googly eyed incomprehension and intellectual curiosity.

Other than Hale, the show actually seems slightly less interesting than last week. And even Hale will only keep me tuning in so long. To be precise, one more week. Then I am out.

I hoped that The Body Farm would be a new Waking the Dead, back when it was fresh and vital. Instead, it is the old Waking the Dead, full of stories that sacrifice competent storytelling to the concept of the story.