The sight of Tom Hardy leering odiously with his suit-jacket sleeves rolled up has been stalking me for weeks. He's on the tube, next to motorways, in shopping centres - in fact, any day now I'm expecting him to turn up at work, smashing some hapless journalist's head into their computer screen. All of which goes to show Sky has brought out the big guns for Martina Cole's The Take, spent a shedload on marketing and not scrimped on production values, either. Is the digital channel, home so recently to the likes of Don't Forget The Lyrics, actually about to take on the mantle of saviour of British drama?

Regardless of whether or not you liked The Take - and I'm sure plenty had it pegged as trash TV from the poster alone - at a time when the industry is all doom and gloom over the prohibitive cost of making drama, you have to admire Sky's nerve. It's made no secret of its desire to become a serious player in drama, and has put its money where its mouth is at a time when others don't have that luxury.

Don't get me wrong, The Take had its faults - not least a stuttering opening episode - but a series of superb performances from Hardy, Charlotte Riley and Shaun Evans helped elevate it above the usual dross proliferating the listings.

As the psychopathic criminal Freddie, Hardy flicks between the endearingly naïve to the frankly terrifying, while Evans completes with ease the journey from Freddie's wide-eyed cousin, Jimmy, to calculating drugs overlord ready to overthrow his increasingly coke-addled relative. In the middle of it all, as usual, are the women and children left to deal with the fallout.

The groundwork has been laid for this fourth and final part to be pretty gruesome and it doesn't disappoint. Proving the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, episode three signed off with Little Freddie murdering Little Jimmy, believing¬ - rightly - that his father loved him more. As the lies and grief start catching up with each of the characters, it's fairly obvious things are going to end badly for Freddie - it's just a question of when...and who.

Admittedly the story isn't cutting edge when it comes to originality, and many will see the series as a by-numbers, Kray-style effort calling on all the genre's gangster clichés (minus Danny Dyer, of course). And in some ways they'd be right.

But with more than a touch of a Greek tragedy about it, hidden beneath the occasionally grating cockney accents is a web of familial deceit, temptation and split loyalties that Mistresses couldn't come close to. And after all, just because you know where you're heading doesn't mean you can't enjoy getting there.