Michele Hewitson: Extraordinary way with lies

The less-than-truthful cast of Ordinary Lies.

Ordinary Lies (Sundays, TV One, 9.30pm) is, thus far, a drama about Martin, a car salesman who - while on a final warning, for lateness, throwing sickies, and falling sales figures - makes up an on-the-spot and far from ordinary lie.

He is going out late and pissing it up and so, out of spite, his wife fails to wake him in time for him get to work on time. She leaves a Post-it note: Where's his bloody car?

He takes a cab to work, late, again, and on arrival at work hides outside and calls the office and says he won't be in: his wife died in the night.

This might have been wishful thinking. His wife suffers from phantom illnesses which a shrink might conclude are related to living with a man who goes out drinking every night and loses his car. Or that she is a bit of a drip.

The lie, as lies do, gets exceedingly sticky. The most successful part of this unlikely situation is perhaps the growing sense of anxiety; of being caught in the web with Marty (Jason Manford) and being a sad little fly about to be eaten by a big fat spider that he's conjured up. Of course, his colleagues are going to send flowers (he pockets the card and says it's a wind-up) and condolence cards (he bribes the postie to bin them.) He's mostly pathetic. He has a terrible line in ungrammatical patter: "That car has done less miles than the Popemobile." He takes up with a colleague, the drippy "spinster", Grace, who might actually be rather determined. She makes him lunch and woos him with cake (and bad, drunk, pool playing.) You know how that's going to end.

You don't actually. The first episode ended with Marty and his not-a-bit-dead wife walking, hand in hand, to 'fess up to the boss. He had already confessed to her - by cellphone, with tears and an admission of failure, from his car from outside their middle-class dream house of red brick and tidy front garden in the suburbs where the windows sparkle and misery of the banal kind resides inside. It ought to be called "Ordinary Misery". There are other, possibly stranger, things going on at the car dealers. The boss is in love with his offsider, whose husband disappeared a year ago. She gets mysterious phone calls from somebody who never speaks. And when will we hear from Gareth? Oh. No. It's not Gareth. It's Mackenzie Crook, who is Pete. All we know about him is that he has sinusitis. That's enough to keep me watching.