Only two episodes of this to go before it's all over (or at least until the end of the second series) and I was willing Ashes To Ashes to get down to business and start pulling its weight. There's no doubting that it's fun and fruity and well made and all that kind of stuff, but it doesn't half go round in circles - the same sort of gags every week, the same little bit of Eighties TV and the sort of half attempts to shoehorn bits of Alex's back story into the increasingly self-contained weekly cop stories. Sadly these annoying themes continued last night.

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So this week's cop show crime story story concerned a young man who was found dead in a river, his head biffed and his wrists cut in a way that suggested he was bound up. When Gene and Alex went to interview the victim's dad (head of a Neighbourhood Watch group) he told them he had fallen out with his son because of his involvement with a local, nasty loanshark called Riley. Cockney spiv Riley had also gained a reputation for marking his non-paying victims' arms so he was suddenly number one suspect.

They went to visit Riley, who turned out to be 'scum' who had to be 'flushed away'. Yes, Gene is still banging on about being a sheriff and cleaning up the Old West. I can see what the writers are trying to do here - in the theme of the best Westerns, here's a man who's used to doing things his way in the face of a changing criminal landscape. But these themes aren't exactly played out in subtle fashion, and, once again, banged on about every single week without too much resolution.

Anyway, the victim's wife was from 'the estate' and loved her fine living, a victim of sorts herself, of Eighties excess. She was a suspect (they found out that the couple were planning an inusrance scam to get them out of the country), but Riley was still public enemy number one. But the heat Gene had put on him provoked Riley's goons to come and beat him up.

Chastened by his beating, it was left to Alex (who was not in the best of health because, thanks to dreamy sequences found out that she was having an operation in the real world to remove the bullet from her noggin) to figure out that the culprit was the victim's dad.

And that was all fair enough, but these self-contained cop stories aren't that strong really. Back in the day each episode story seemed to have some significance to Alex's way back home, but now there doesn't seem to be sense anywhere. It's all a bit of mess, but with only two episodes to go it needs to shape up and shape up pretty quickly.