Collision, ITV1/The Execution of Gary Glitter, Channel 4

The strands of Collision will unfold in nightly instalments for the rest of this week, and the opener duly lobbed a lot of balls into the air and left them hanging there. We were led into the story in the company of Detective Inspector John Tolin (Douglas Henshall), a haggard, bestubbled officer returning to active duty after recuperating from some unspecified personal trauma, possibly involving a road accident. He kept protesting that he "needed work" to kick him back into action, and after an indigestible dollop of plot exposition from a senior officer - where we learned that a Metropolitan Police patrol car might have caused the accident while pursuing a couple of suspects - Tolin was diligently mapping out speeds and impact angles of the wrecked vehicles.

Then we embarked on a series of flashback tours of the lives of the crash victims, who between them are, or were, harbouring an extraordinary number of murky secrets. Dan and Jeff Rampton of the Home2Bed furniture company are engaged in a smuggling racket between Harwich and the Hook of Holland. Karen Donnelly, the boss's PA at Hayes Douglas Chemicals, seems to be up to her neck in industrial espionage. Mild-mannered piano teacher Sidney Norris has the haunted look of a blackmail victim. And Richard Reeves (Paul McGann) is a millionaire property developer, so obviously we don't like him much. Hard to say how all this will pan out, but I have an inkling it's not going to rank alongside Horowitz's other creation, the estimable DCS Christopher Foyle.

According to Channel 4's The Execution of Gary Glitter, a recent opinion poll showed that 54 per cent of British adults supported the re-introduction of the death penalty. However, we don't know what that figure would have been if respondents had been asked if they supported the re-introduction of the death penalty for Gary Glitter, who was convicted of committing obscene acts with minors in Vietnam and will be on the UK's Sex Offenders Register for the rest of his life.

This was a thoroughly bizarre film,seemingly plucking Glitter's name randomly out of a hat to serve as the focus of a quasi-documentary debate about the British public's nostalgia for the noose. The erstwhile "Leader" has become a reviled and loathsome figure, but though writer/director/producer Rob Coldstream evoked an imaginary Britain in which the death penalty had been restored, and where a Capital Crimes against Children act was in force, Glitter seemed a baffling choice for the first one through the trapdoor.

The proposition was that he merited the death penalty for raping underage girls, though Vietnamese authorities dropped that particular charge against him, and it wouldn't have been a capital crime when the death penalty was in force in Britain up to 1969 (Hilton McRae as Glitter, right)

Why did Coldstream use a washed-up pop star in the first place? How about a terrorist or a war criminal? But anyway, commentators including Miranda Sawyer, Anne Widdecombe and Garry Bushell had allowed themselves to be roped in to provide "real"commentary on these fictional events, and the predominant message seemed to be that a pampered liberal elite had held sway for too long, and at last the people's desire for retribution against paedophiles was being heard. It was impossible to tell whether Coldstream was satirising the string-'em-up brigade or sympathising with them. As for European human rights laws, the imaginary government had decided not to implement them any longer. Just like that. Channel 4, are you sure you really wanted to broadcast this film?

Collision is on ITV1 at 9pm from Tuesday to Friday