You know when you watch something and it annoys you to the point where you want to throw the television out of the window, but at the same time liked it enough to keep watching until the end? OK, I’ll admit that these programmes are very rare, containing as they do the same levels of ridiculousness and decentness, but the point is that Kiss Of Death was one of those programmes. It looked very good, had some good people in it, and had a surefire, winning story about a gruesome murderer. But it also had some vomit-inducing camera work, so very shaky narrative gimmicks and Danny Dyer, who seems to only able play one character and one character only (hungover cockney). So why did I watch until the end?

Kiss Of Death started in all-over-the-shop fashion, with a severed arm found on the side of a river. One woman seemed to be in charge, barking as she did… actually Kiss Of Death is pretty difficult to review because there were scenes played twice, from different characters’ point of view, and all sorts of visual tomfoolery going on. There were flashforwards, flashbacks… jerky cameras and quick, little zooms into characters’ faces.

So what basically happened was that a team had been assembled by Kay Rousseau (Louise Lombard), a crack detective, to investigate a gruesome murder. The killer had left an arm by the side of a river, but there were no clues, no forensics, no nothing.

It was clear that the team did not like each other and each member had something going on (you could tell this by the amount of stolen glances at each other, little whispered conversations and, erm, huge arguments with each other). Rousseau, we learned in flashbacks, had been arrested on suspicion of murdering her baby daughter in the recent-to-medium past. The hotshot forensic detective on duty, George, testified against Rousseau in the baby case and used to have a drink problem (in fact, some of the team suggested she still had). Matt Costello (Dyer) had always fancied Rousseau, profiler Dr Clive was Rosseau’s lover and there was bitterness and bad blood between them, and rookie cop Jude (Sugar Rush’s Lenora Crichlow) just made Costello angry all the time for no particular reason.

Much has been made of the fact that Waking The Dead’s Barbara Machin had written this. In Waking The Dead Boyd is the man with big demons and shouts a lot, but in this everyone hated each other and had serious emotional issues. Waking The Dead is like watching Trumpton compared to this.

The killer was very, very clever indeed. He used the fact that George used to like a drink or two to drive the team apart and terrorise them psychologically, causing them to always look over their shoulder and argue among themselves. We saw the killer hide under George’s bed and collect his own forensic evidence (hairs etc). Every time he released a new clue or body part, he put one of George’s DNA-infested things on there… soon the team were starting to question George and how come bits of her hair were apprearing on bits of leg or decapitated head.

For the first half hour or so of this you were left scratching your head – the flashbacks, the flashforwards and the repeated scenes from different angles left me questioning what in blazes was happening.

But there was a story in among all the visual gimmickry – it turned out that a newlywed couple had been kidnapped. It was the groom’s body that the killer had strewn all over the place, and it was a race against time to rescue the bride.

George had to remember if anyone could have held a grudge against her, and she remembered that she had, a long while back, helped to send down a soldier called Bovary with quesionable evidence. It was definitely Bovary, and he was looking to destroy George and get his revenge.

He was finally captured and brought in but he wouldn’t talk, which was unhelpful because he had set up a video camera pointed at the missing bride in a dark and dingy cellar. She was close to death… death cam. Nice.

The trails eventually led to his house and there, behind a makeshift wall, the team found the missing bride. Just in time.

There was a tense scene where Rousseau had to tease a confession out of Bovary, and she fearlessly used her own experiences with her daughter’s murder case to do it. Bovary was a very scary man indeed, and the dynamic between the female detective and the killer reminded me of Silence Of The Lambs.

There was one twist in the tale… flashback time to when Costello had argued with Jude about some evidence she had found. This was before Bovary had been captured, and Jude was convinced she knew where the killer was. So she left the team in their high-tech incident room. She found Bovary alright…

So Kiss Of Death. A one-off, glossy police drama. Very American-looking. But all those gimmicks left my head spinning. Even though you weren’t sure what was going on in the early part, there was just enough speed and momentum to keep you watching. Just enough information was released in each short scene to keep you watching, and that’s quite clever.

However, despite the scariness of the killer and the extreme goriness and bloodiness of it all (Rousseau received a head in the post, a la Seven), no amount of gimmicks can disguise a hum-drum story. Luckily, Kiss Of Death was just above average in terms of story, so it just about got away with it.

What I really didn’t like were the characters – after all the arguing and shouting and emotional problems, I just didn’t care a lot for them.

Bring back Boyd and his random shouting!