Lucy Punch

TV preview: Motherland, BBC2

How kind of the BBC to save the sitcom pilot with the most potential until last.

Cop comedy drama Vexed has returned for a second series, complete with a brand new partner for Toby Stephens' lazy, disorganised and self-regarding detective inspector Jack Armstrong. Lucy Punch leaves the cast to be replaced by Miranda Raison as DI Georgina Dixon, and I'm sorry to say there is as little chemistry between the new pairing as there was between the old. Possibly even less.

This is something of a problem when your whole series is predicated on one of those love/hate, chalk/cheese, will they/won't they relationships beloved of television producers.

It is never helpful to apportion blame, but nonetheless the fault lies with Stephens' insistence on trying to play the comedy instead of the character. What he produces is a bizarre and wholly irritating combination of Simon Templar and Swiss Tony, the car salesman from The Fast Show. He attempts loveable oaf, but manages only the second bit.

No Lucy Punch in the second series of this comedy detective drama. Instead, we have Miranda Spooks Raison's ambitious Georgina Dixon alongside Toby Stephens as laid-back DI Jack Armstrong. She ruffles his feathers as she tries to beat him solving their first case together. More sparks to come, we think.

The biggest mystery to be solved in this police procedural is how it got recommissioned after a widely panned debut two years ago. The format borrows heavily from Moonlighting, purporting to be a comedy drama about a dishevelled detective (Toby Stephens) tackling crimes and sparking off a sassy female sidekick - Spooks' Miranda Raison has stepped in after Lucy Punch jumped ship. Upon examination of the evidence, there's little comedy and hardly any drama to recommend in tonight's opener about a car dealer's murder.

Miranda Raison: I'm completely different to Lucy Punch

Vexed newcomer Miranda Raison has insisted that she will be a "completely different" influence on the show to her predecessor Lucy Punch.

Quite a few people weren't sure what to make of the BBC's detective-mystery-comedy-thing Vexed during its brief period on air in 2010, but we've been assured by the cast that this second series is a lot stronger - and who are we to doubt them?

Toby Stephens is back as the cocky, incompetent DI Jack Armstrong and this time he's joined by Spooks actress Miranda Raison as DI Georgina Dixon, who is replacing original lead actress Lucy Punch. Only time will tell if the new duo are dynamic or dull - but if Raison can boast banter like that in the clip from series one, then perhaps this could be Vexed's moment to shine.

Vexed episode 1.3 review

Here's my problem with Vexed in a nutshell: it wants to have a compelling will-they-won't-they flavour amid the sleuthing, but Jack (Toby Stephens) and Kate (Lucy Punch) have no real chemistry.

I don't know what to make of Vexed. At first I only saw its faults. But then, thinking about the wider context of odd-couple comedy dramas - as wide as a krill net, this - I thought, well, at least writer Howard Overman is trying something different. It's not every Sunday night you see detectives ignoring the corpse bleeding on the rug to admire the cornice work.

Scenes like that one will probably have made some of the Sunday night constituency very vexed indeed. But an older audience must surely remember when all crime series were this politically incorrect, and when the central characters were sexist and made anti-gay jokes. Maybe Vexed owes a debt to Life On Mars but it's still remarkable that Jack Armstrong (Toby Stephens) is cracking gags about cancer sufferers, given all the post-Sachsgate rules and regulations. It's as if Vexed has slipped through a hole in the fence during a sentry shift-change at the BBC Trust.

Now five police forces are chasing it round the schedules, turning it into an unlikely recipient for public sympathy.

On balance, I probably want Vexed to be caught before its scheduled end but not before we find out whether Armstrong and fellow DI, the equally self-obsessed Kate Bishop (Lucy Punch) tumble into bed together; because, let's face it, that's why we watch these shows in the first place.

"So, let me guess - obesity and OCD right?" "She's a cleaner." Jack Armstrong (Toby Stephens) bulldozes through tonight's case set in a Priory-style rehab clinic with all the charm of an 80s cop who's found himself on duty in 2010 - a kind of posh, reverse Gene Hunt. It feels slightly stretched to fill an hour, but there's a lot to enjoy here, especially Kate's (Lucy Punch) awkward marriage counselling session.

The second slice of this jaunty comedy drama about a flirtatious detective duo. While Jack (Toby Stephens) and Kate (Lucy Punch) investigate the attempted murder of a big-money banker by car bomb, he's distracted by nosiness about her love-life and she tries to keep her marriage counselling sessions secret. It's an attempt at a modern-day Moonlighting and for that to work, the leads need to have genuine chemistry. Sadly, these two don't, meaning their banter grates rather than fizzes.