Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Robert Glenister, Indira Varma, Dino Fetscher, Neil Stuke, Christiane Paul, Lesley Sharp, Dominik Tiefenthaler, Michael Maloney, Anjli Mohindra, Kevin Doyle, Jonathan Ojinnaka, William Flanagan, John Duttine, William Ash, Daniel Drewes, Polly Walker, Richard Wheeldon, Jason Done, Danny Hutson.

When taking on a big television production, one with a tale that should be enormous and potentially gripping beyond anything else on television in a single year, it often helps the series realise its own levels of genius by not overpowering it with too many subplots and characters to whom the story would not miss one single iota. Some of the greatest mini-series ever have relied solely on the narrow focus, on the detail and not the illusion and it is unfortunately a piece of television advice forgotten largely in the creation of Paranoid.

The series, it could be argued, overran by at least several episodes, characters drawn into the proceedings to whom the screen faded into obscurity when they appeared and the true story being lost in a mish-mash of relationships that in the end really meant nothing to overall arc or conclusion to the whole affair. Being tarnished with the inclusion of light weight additions is hard on a story and it is a shame that more could not be made of Robert Glenister, Lesley Sharp and Linda Felber’s time on screen, or at least given more impetuous to a tale of medical malpractice and potential scandal; in the end Paranoid felt more like a third cousin to Harrison Ford’s superb remake of The Fugitive than a film of its own brilliance taking centre stage.

Robert Glenister was at least allowed to shine in the role of Bobby Day, and in his relationship with Quaker Lucy Cannonbury, played with genuine affection by Lesley Sharp, the fragments of life on the edge, of the suspicions and mistrust that can envelope us all at one point or another, was given the drama of humanity and caring that played off against the snake skin charms of the pharmaceutical company in the shape of Danny Hutson’s Nick Waingrow.

A disappointing series, on the whole unremarkable and yet one that could have easily been a well received piece of television; one that was obsessed with its own grandeur than with its sincerity.

Ian D. Hall