Cheat review: All the thrills of the teddy bear’s picnic

How can you tell in a TV thriller that someone’s life is about to go horribly wrong? Answer: when they are shown to be living a smug, cosy middle-class existence. And in the first episode of Cheat, the life of university lecturer Leah Dale (Katherine Kelly) seems to be just that: on the verge of a permanent job; trying for a baby; living in a comfortable book-lined home in leafy Cambridge; riding to work on her bicycle on sunny days… What could go wrong?

Well, as this is an old-style psychological thriller, seemingly cut from a well-worn ITV template, everything. All that Leah holds dear is about to be torn apart.

And from the moment we see student Rose Vaughan (Molly Windsor), we know she will do the tearing. It is easy to tell, simply from the way she looks at the end of each scene – anyone who has such mastery of the knowing half-smirk is going to be bad. It is the TV trope of the quietly evil.

Rose submits a dissertation that is excellent – so excellent it bears little resemblance to her other work. Leah questions her about it, Rose gets stroppy and fails to provide any evidence of her research, so Leah fails her on suspicion of cheating.

While Rose seethes, it emerges that Leah’s life is not quite as good as it appears: the attempts to become pregnant haven’t worked; she’s having sexual fantasies about her boss at college; and she should be taking medication but has stopped to get pregnant (we don’t know what the tablets are for – the bottle says Dosatriptyline, which, according to Google, doesn’t exist – but I would put money on it being for a mental condition. Really, it seems that predictable.)

Having lit the drama’s blue touchpaper by failing Rose, Leah signally fails to stand back, instead spitefully humiliating the student during a lecture.

At one point, Rose tells her, with the chilly calm of a classic TV psychopath: “You don’t think I am capable of writing that essay when you don’t even know what I am capable of…”

What Rose is capable of, we are led to believe, is cosying up to Leah’s husband Adam and killing their cat.

Yes, that’s it. Even though this four-parter is billed as a thriller, the first episode contains all the thrills of the teddy bear’s picnic. In fact, to try to hook the viewer, it has to use flash-forwards (as opposed to flashbacks). Scenes showing Adam’s dead body, police detectives looking at pictures of Leah and Rose, the two women in a detention centre, on either side of a glass screen, are dropped into the slow-moving current-day events, as if to say: “There’s not a lot happening now, but there will be soon – honest.”

And, let’s not forget, we don’t actually see Rose do the things she is accused of. We only have Leah’s suspicions – and she’s the one who’s not been taking her meds.

However, what this opening episode (of four, over consecutive evenings) has is two well-judged central performances and plenty of intrigue. There isn’t much out-and-out action, but it has a palpable feeling that writer Gaby Hull is carefully moving pieces into place for a big climax – just enough manoeuvring to make me curious about episode two.

Let’s just hope that Cheat breaks free and becomes something more than the stereotypical TV pyschodrama it looks like. Otherwise it will be a long four nights – which no amount of flash-forwards will be able to disguise.