The Whistleblowers ITV1, 9pm
The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle BBC2, 9pm
The Peter Serafinowicz Show BBC2, 9.30pm

PERHAPS initial expectations were unrealistically high for The Whistleblowers, given that its Bafta-winning creator, Tony Marchant, has written two of TV's best one-off dramas of the past 12 months in Recovery and Mark of Cain.

Sadly, The Whistleblowers's debut was greeted with a muted raspberry from TV critics, who accused it of being worthy but unconvincing, as well as all-too cosily familiar despite its glossy, high-speed surface sheen (lots of truncated wobbly-cam shots and almost every character in constant motion).

Now it's reached episode three, I reckon there's something far more basically wrong with The Whistleblowers: there's simply been a fatal miscasting of its married pair of crusading liberal lawyers, Ben and Alisha, who have charged themselves with uncovering public malfeasances while juggling their young daughter's daily childcare arrangements.

As Ben, curly-haired Richard Coyle looks like a wussier nephew to Martin Shaw during his long-ago incarceration in The Professionals. However, instead of recklessly dashing around overturning Ford Capris in the name of justice, Coyle looks as though he'd be happier righting wrongs by pressing flowers or beginning a new page in his stamp album.

In the same way, Indira Virma, as Alisha, resembles comedy impressionist Ronni Ancona. You can thus never shake the feeling that she's just an actor pretending to be another actor pretending to be someone else, in the hope of a laugh.

As if none of that was disabling enough, last night's edition offered a bunch of baddies who were all more complex, subtle, credible and compelling than our two supposed good guys.

First, there was the lizardly schools bureaucrat who oversaw the child-unfriendly running of her shiny semi-privatised New Labour-approved city academy, St Justin's, via banks of CCTV cameras. Then there was the callous MP who wanted to sell off the state's pesky, non-profit-making comprehensive education system.

Most memorably nasty of all was the snake-like creationist self-made millionaire played by George Costigan. You just knew he was dabbling in modernday inner-city schooling for his own glory and edification (and profit). I hated the lot of 'em, let me tells ya, I hated 'em!

Sadly, due to Ben and Alisha being such weak-kneed cyphers, The Whistleblowers failed to engage us in the pressing contemporary social issue it reckoned to confront: how snake-like schools bureaucrats, lizardly politicians and self-serving entrepreneurs are monkeying about with our state education system, to the detriment of its inner-city end-users, ie the kids.

Elsewhere, The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle betrayed its own comic promise by imploding minutes into what was only its second episode. Shockingly, it now stands revealed as a lazy, predictable, laugh-free tellybiz in-joke.

And so promisingly it had begun, too. As cold, steely daytime TV talk-show harridan Vivienne V, Jennifer Saunders has banished memories of her previous big sitcom role: scatty, manic hedonist Eddie Monsoon in Absolutely Fabulous.

There's also the intriguing provenance of Vivienne V's strange marriage to gay Jared, a man who, left to his own devices, whiles away the minutes by miming to Shirley Bassey records.

But that's about it. A sub-plot about a warmer, funnier, more populist daytime TV talk-show rival (played by Brian Conley) went unresolved. What few jokes were offered were the same as last week's, wrung through a mangle. The show also managed to under-employ vintage sitcom bruiser Elaine C Smith.

Thankfully, Thursdays are redeemed by the star of The Peter Serafinowicz Show. He's mad, he's bad, he's dangerously funny to watch as he teeters along the tightrope of good taste, satirising terrible TV with gusto, vim and zip.