Emotions ran just as high in Psychos (Channel 4, Thursday), in which - oh quelle surprise - a naughty, bad-ass renegade boy goes head-to-head with the system, gets pissed a lot and exercises his aggressive charm on a frail and uptight lady colleague. This set-up is becoming a foregone conclusion in TV drama; but Psychos handles it better than most. It's not as dark as the hype suggested - narratively speaking, it handles the same kind of professional dilemmas and personal woes as mainstream hospital dramas - but it benefits from a charismatic central performance by flavour-of-the-month Douglas Henshall, and a nice balance of black humour and pathos. The edgy atmosphere is maintained by a strong cast but it's a pity the indulgence that the script and direction afford to Henshall's character couldn't have been shared more equally among them.
While he dashes about commanding attention with his footie jokes and flailing ginger locks, the others look rather lightly sketched. It's too simplistic to assign all the passion, funny lines and mercurial delivery to him and cloister his co-star Neve McIntosh in middle-class repression.
Psychos' writer David Wolstonecraft seems to be one of many Scots who have trouble distinguishing "gritty social realism" from "shouty machismo".
The Scotsman May 1999