Pretty formulaic stuff here, nicely made in a picturesque Lake District location. It kept my attention throughout, but failed to offer any particular thrills or surprises. It did raise my blood pressure on a number of occasions though, albeit unintentionally. Mainly because it failed to offer any likeable characters to root for. By the fourth episode I was pretty much hoping that every single person in it would die a horrible death - which I suspect was not the intention of the show. Still, the one character I didn't loathe - the young boy - gave a solid and believable performance, which actually eclipsed all of the more experienced adult talent, with the exception of Christopher E, who gave his usual strong but by-the-numbers turn. Fairly typical ITV drama. Not great, not terrible.

Given the strength of the lead actors and the crux of the story - setting up a Safe House in the country, I watched the first episode and part of the second. A little way through the second, I started to wonder why I was still watching? It was so slow. The bad guy appeared to be able to do anything he liked, and I could sense that somehow he was going to find the Safe House. I just wasn't prepared to sit through another two episodes to see this happen. Maybe this just wasn't to my taste? I guess the main thing that got me was the story. Everything else seemed OK. However, as the story is the equivalent of the brick walls to a house, this one fell down very quickly.

This is an example of a thin ITV drama stretched out and reliant on its star power. Christopher Eccleston was protecting the wife of a gangster who was shot dead as she was due to give evidence against her husband.The now retired Eccleston still haunted by his past mistake is running a guest house in the Lake District with his wife. He is asked by his old boss Paterson Joseph to turn it into a safe house for a family whose son is being stalked by a psychopath released from jail.Both multiple plot lines head for a dramatic and explosive showdown but feels more like a damp squib especially as you always feel the Joseph is somehow implicated in the first plot line. Plenty of flashbacks and overwrought characters but it could had been told more effectively in two hours.

This four part mini-series on ITV sought to combine two stories and bind them together in the persons of ex-cop Christopher Ecclestone and his old boss, still active police commander Paterson Joseph. Ecclestone was the policeman latterly assigned to chaperone the wife of a ruthless gangster, about to give incriminatory evidence against her husband, but in a constantly, in fact very much overplayed scene, he gets shot by a marksman accompanying her back from a shop they stop off at, from which prone position he witnesses her being shot to death in the dark, driving rain, by the same shooter. The second strand comes when boss Joseph encourages a by now physically if not psychologically recovered Ecclestone and his new wife to use their remote country hideaway as a safe house for a dysfunctional family of five, the apparent target of a psychopathic ex-con, who starts proceedings by attempting to kidnap the little boy when the family are attending a fun-fair at night.As usual with these many-part dramas, some characters and some situations do come and go somewhat and also as usual, the long arm of coincidence reaches deep and actually quite often within the narrative which whilst this might help add drama and tension more often beggared belief and damaged credibility. In particular the ways the not especially bright ex-con miraculously avoids discovery by the police and then unerringly tracks down the target family with just his mobile phone, took some swallowing.I also felt the joining of the two stories seemed somewhat strained and that taken separately, they may have worked better as two independent tales. Still, the two big climaxes worked well, the reveal of the plot twist was quite surprising and there was an enigmatic finish just to send you off to bed scratching your head over the exact relationship between Joseph and Ecclestone's wife (brother and sister, childhood sweethearts?).As for the acting, I wasn't particularly held by any of the major parts. Ecclestone and his wife seemed unsuited, generating no real belief to me anyway of a strong, loving relationship. Likewise, I had a hard time accepting Joseph as the senior cop over Ecclestone, while as for the dysfunctional family I found the actors playing their parts pretty dysfunctional too, especially the two snotty teenagers.However in its favour, the solitariness of the countryside was put to good use and there was sufficient tension, punctuated by dramatic action, to keep me watching over the four episodes.On the whole then, a commendable thriller, just a bit too cliché-bound and improbable to fully convince.