The Escape Artist, episode 1, review It's now 15 years since I gave up being a solicitor - and a corporate litigator at that, not a criminal defence brief. But even I could have come up with a better legal storyline than the first episode of BBC One's new crime thriller The Escape Artist. Barrister Will Burton was played flawlessly by David Tennant, TV's leading man de nos jours. He was defending apparent slimeball Liam Foyle, played by Toby Kebbell, against a murder charge. The first argument made by the prosecution was that Foyle was addicted to extreme pornography, a point they tried to prove with expert testimony about his computer. Amazingly, nobody except Burton - not the prosecution, not the judge, not the expert witness - seemed to have spotted that there was no actual evidence of extreme porn use on the actual computer. The evidence came from Foyle's credit card statements - credit cards which could, of course, have been stolen. The judge flayed himself for being so silly; a mistrial was declared; Foyle walked free. It was all very dramatic - and all very daft. In the real world, not a single one of those characters would have missed such an obvious point of evidence. Certainly, no Crown Court judge would have risked a mistrial or an appeal by denying the defence the opportunity to call their own expert witness. Still, lots of crime dramas pivot on silly points of law (step forward, Law & Order: UK). The Escape Artist could have been forgiven, if the rest of the episode had contained something - anything - to get viewers hooked. Instead, Spooks creator David Wolstencroft's script was filled with clichés and signposts jostled to fill the entire hour. Burton's gorgeous, plate-glass London flat was the sort of place that invites violent horror. Viewers may remember Maxine Peake's very similar-looking house in the second series of Criminal Justice and the fate that befell her. Anybody who's ever seen Fatal Attraction will have known that it was a Very Bad Idea Indeed for Burton's wife Kate (played by Ashley Jensen) to get into a bubble bath. Indeed, the second half of the episode screamed, over and over again, that Kate was going to get killed - and, sure enough, killed she then was. There are two more episodes to go, and presumably at least one of them contains a genuine surprise. But if so, it's a shame that this first hour was so predictable - because I, for one, don't feel the need to find out what those surprises might be.