Radio Times: Review by:; Jane Rackham

Behind the squeaky clean exterior of 1968 Durham suburbia, with its tidy lawns, gleaming cars and freshly pressed kiddies, there’s a regular Peyton Place of secrets and scandals swilling about.

George Gently and John Bacchus are investigating the snatching of a baby girl from its nice new home. Helen Baxendale and the splendid Mark Gatiss play the middle-class parents who’ve adopted a child from
a home for unmarried mothers run with military precision by the not exactly charitable Mrs Dunwoody (Alison Steadman). Meanwhile, Bacchus is struggling with parenthood. “You were never much as a son, but you are a spectacularly useless dad,” his father tells him. Ouch.

About this programme

3/4. A middle-class couple's adopted child is kidnapped, a case that takes Gently and Bacchus to a home where unmarried mothers are forced to give up their babies. Suspicion initially falls upon the natural mother, who is thought to have `stolen' her baby back. But further investigations reveal a much darker side to the adoption home itself and raise questions as to how far this seemingly perfect couple were prepared to go to become parents. Martin Shaw and Lee Ingleby star, with Mark Gatiss, Helen Baxendale and Alison Steadman.