I so wanted to enjoy White Lines but it’s spectacularly uninvolving

If I could live my life over again my plan used to be that I’d make my fortune very early, spend my winters fox hunting through the season and my summers taking loads of ecstasy in Ibiza and having meaningless sex with beautiful strangers. But having seen the first two episodes of White Lines I’m not so sure about the second part of that equation: it all looks a bit sordid and depressing and really not much fun.

‘Do you know this is not making me want to live in Ibiza AT ALL,’ said the Fawn, as we watched, morosely. And I have to admit, I agree. I so wanted to enjoy this series. Dance music, pills, violence, intrigue, gorgeous locations, my lovely mate Laurence Fox as a ridiculous hippie guru with his personal sacred cow… it has so many of the right ingredients. But watching it feels strenuous and frustrating — not unlike when you’ve dropped an E and you’re waiting for ages for it to kick in but nothing seems to be happening.

Written by Alex Pina (who also scripted the stylish Spanish bank robbery thriller Money Heist), it’s about a strait-laced northern girl’s quest to find out what really happened to her DJ brother Axel in Ibiza 20 years ago, after his long-missing body is found bashed, stabbed and desiccated on the Almerian property of a rich and faintly sinister Ibizan club-owning family.

The problem with this whodunit/whydunit genre — Twin Peaks set the template for this — is that it allows for an awful lot of self-indulgent meandering, invariably leading to a dénouement so bathetic, and involving a plot revelation so tortured and convoluted that you wonder why you bothered. That’s why it’s so important with these things that on the way to your inevitable disappointment, you at least get to hang with a few characters you care about.