When did Sunday night TV become so grim? Baptiste reviewed

There was, you may remember, a time when Sunday night television was rather a jolly affair: gently plotted and full of rosy-cheeked yokels, twinkly coppers and warm-hearted patriarchs. Well, not any more — as BBC1’s Baptiste and ITV’s Professor T confirm. Both feature main characters, and quite a few supporting ones, with backstories so abidingly grim that you can only hope they don’t send out annual Christmas circulars.

So it is that Julien Baptiste — French detective turned freelance missing-persons hunter — now has a dead daughter to go with his imprisoned son. Meanwhile, Cambridge academic Jasper Tempest’s OCD is clearly linked to the fact that, at the age of seven, he found his alcoholic father hanging from a noose in the family hallway.

The pair have other similarities too — beyond proving that, as one Baptiste character puts it, ‘sometimes just bad horrible shit happens’. For one thing, they’re regarded with profound suspicion by the police chiefs they’ve been brought in to help: in Baptiste’s case, a woman in Budapest whose Turkish father suffers constant racist attacks; in Tempest’s, a man whose only daughter was killed in a hit-and-run six months previously. They’re also much given to delivering little aphorisms that, as you might expect, tend to the gloomy. ‘We are cursed to carry the burdens for the choices we cannot control,’ observed Baptiste on Sunday. ‘Our conscience is our foundation: once contaminated, it can destroy everything,’ noted the prof.

Of the two programmes, Baptiste is, by some distance, the less gently plotted. Last week’s opening episode began with Baptiste himself (Tchéky Karyo) — now in his second series as a solo artist following his show-stealing appearances in The Missing — watching the television news.