Loose ends

On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of a gruff but kindly detective with a beard. Even so, she needn’t worry too much about getting typecast. In BBC1’s Strike, she continued as the immaculately turned-out, London-dwelling Robin, who uses such traditional sleuthing methods as Google searches. On Channel 4, not only was she dressed in rags, with a spectacular facial scar and a weird hairdo, she was also living in an unnamed dystopian city, where her detective work relied on a handy capacity to read minds.

This was the first and highly promising episode of Electric Dreams, which has set itself the ambitious task of adapting ten sci-fi stories by Philip K. Dick, each with a different writer, director and cast. Sunday’s programme opened with a demonstration understandably protesting against a new law that all citizens must have their minds read by the mutants known as Teeps — as in telepathics.