Playing Nice review: James Norton's new drama has such an over-the-top villain I'm considering legal action

Judge John Deed, Kavanagh QC, even Better Call Saul's Jimmy McGill would have done; anyone to sort out the plot holes and inconsistencies in this increasingly bonkers melodrama.

Pete Riley (James Norton) and his partner Maddie Wilson (Niamh Algar) live in a nice house in a lovely Cornish seaside town with their little son Theo.

It's not long, however – once we've established that Pete is a stay-at-home dad, Maddie is a chef with her own restaurant, and they're troubled by unpaid bills – before they are told of a mix-up at the hospital in the hours after Theo's birth means he may not be their son after all.

Enter the impossibly perfect couple Miles (James McArdle) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay), parents to David, the boy who has been swapped with Theo.

They are wealthy, cultured and apparently obsessed with filming themselves with CCTV cameras installed in every nook and cranny of their Grand Designs-style clifftop home.

It's not long before Miles, in particular, is dogging Pete and Maddie's every turn, pitching up conveniently every time they do something which could conceivably be misconstrued in any later legal proceedings.

Even to the extent of having legal papers drafted, signed and witnessed, ready for that exact moment he catches Maddie and Pete in a white lie designed to get them out of an awkward weekend away with Miles and Lucy.

Playing Nice wants you to ask consider what you would do in the same situation – faced with the idea that the child you have invested all your love and devotion in is not, in fact, your child.

How does that colour your relationship with the child, with your partner, with the child taken from you by mistake and placed with another family? And in this case, is blood really thicker than water?

Unfortunately, the question you actually end up asking yourself is, why did it take Pete and Maddie two episodes to hire a lawyer?

The enter into some sort of custody arrangement with Miles and Lucy with no legal advice, no social services support and absolutely no idea.

You can't believe that two people who love their child and want the best for themselves, Theo and David would do something so bone-headed.

You can't believe their astonishment when the whole thing turns nasty and Miles begins the battle to win custody of both boys.

And you can't believe anyone would willingly speak to Miles, who falls millimetres short of donning a cape, twirling a waxed moustache and cackling madly every time he appears on screen.

He appears Dracula-like, at Pete and Maddie's door right from the off, having apparently circumvented all legal, privacy and safeguarding regulations and yet the dozy couple seem desperate to welcome him into their home.

And as we know from the vampire legend, once you invite one into your home, you're doomed.

In fact, Miles is so cartoonishly villainous that he throws the whole thing off-balance and after the first two episodes you can convince yourself that Playing Nice will end with Maddie tied to a railway track in the path of an oncoming loco.

There are all sorts of plot points dropped into the mix with a clang, from repeated mentions of Lucy having a brilliant career as an artist before meeting Miles – coercive and controlling behaviour, anyone? - to Miles giving the couple a nanny cam set-up, which he's bound to hack into, and then insisting that he Pete go surfing, despite the Cornish native apparently never having gone near the water.

All the while, the melodrama builds with crashing waves, swelling strings and flashbacks in grainy film stock.

Playing Nice desperately wants to be a drama tackling serious, moral issues, but that particular train veers off the rails almost from the start and careers towards those Cornish cliffs.

If only they had a lawyer to keep things on the straight and narrow.