The unequivocally titled Adultery began with a somewhat portentous voiceover. ‘There is a psychological equation,’ it intoned. ‘Attraction plus an obstacle equals excitement. But what happens if the attraction is too strong and the obstacles are too great? Do you threaten everything?’ The answer to the latter question would turn out to be a firm ‘yes’ – but first, the show had to get the adulterers together: something it did with commendable efficiency.

Following one of those familiar scenes of everyday family chaos, harassed mum Beth set off on yet another errand for her teenage son Ollie and knocked a hunky bloke off his bike with her car. By coincidence, the hunky bloke in question was Ollie’s girlfriend’s father, Tom – a GP by trade – whom she’d somehow never met before.

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After they’d established the link, and chortled inordinately over the possibility that they might one day become joint grandparents, Beth (Romola Garai) drove Tom (Dominic Cooper) to A&E, where the bantz continued and her solicitousness about his slightly injured wrist approached the obsessive. More significantly still, when he walked off to the X-ray........

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