Honest
ITV1, 9pm

WE must laud ITV head honcho Michael Grade for his prolonged attempt over the past year to rescue the ailing channel via heavy investment in the traditional craft of telly drama.

The veteran TV boss could have opted for a quick, cut-price fix by carpeting ITV1 wall-to-wall with quasi-documentaries You know the sort: yon thoughtless, facile ones that intercut footage of B-list celebs with mildly amusing jibes from Z-list cultural commentators. He could have installed more CCTV cameras in more faux-ordinary homes and secretly filmed yet more unprincipled double-glazing salesmen/plumbers/ vicars relieving themselves in OAPs' kitchen sinks in Unprincipled Double-Glazing Salesmen/Plumbers/Vicars from Hell! Or he could have numbed our minds and buttocks with yet more cheapskate, melodramatic talent contests featuring toneless wannabes and tantrum-prone judges.

Instead, Grade has spent lots of dosh on legions of writers, platoons of actors and battalions of backroom production talent, fully aware that not every drama would recoup its investment by being a winner. He has boldly gambled on cleverness and creativity by backing a wide range of new standalone plays and serial dramas.

Sadly, his hefty investment in Honest has been undone by his executive underlings. Some drama-department middle-manager should have known long ago, as soon as he read Honest's script, that this allegedly comic portrait of a dysfunctional family of ne'er-do-wells - headed by Amanda Redman - is merely a more crass, entirely brainless version of At Home with the Braithwaites.

As earthy and capable mother-hen Lindsay Carter, Redman toils valiantly to distinguish her new role from her most recent one, as earthy and capable mother-hen Sandra Pullman in New Tricks. The actual difference between the two is, to say the least, marginal. Lindsay's hair is curlier and blonder than Sandra's and, instead of three rascally old cops to control, she has a roguish and good-hearted thief of a hubby to accommodate. This she does - just before he goes to jail for four years - by sex-romping with him in gigglesome sub-Carry On knockabout fashion. Thereafter, Redman's fizzog must stoically assume a look that is midway between resolute, chastened and exasperated as her wackily lovable family - those crazy quasi-criminal Carters! - act lovable and wacky.

One of Lindsay's twin sons, Vin the amiable housebreaker, is very dim. Very, very dim. Dim Vin is in fact less illuminated (or illuminating) than Mark Lawrenson wrapped in thick black cloth and imprisoned in a dungeon lit by a three-watt lightbulb that hasn't been switched on.

Lindsay's other twin son, Taylor, is an emergent young lawyer whose success is predicated largely on the fact that, at his job interview, he pretended to be Muslim. Taylor's sassy schoolgirl sister, Lianna, aids him in this implausible deceit by turning up periodically at his office wearing a burqa. That's when clever aspirant film-maker Lianna isn't just as implausibly blackmailing her school's assistant head teacher over her carnal liaison with Taylor.

There's another sister, pelmet-skirted blonde bombsite Kacie Carter, who wants to be a glamour model. She thus keeps showing leering men her portfolio of saucy shots. This causes them to engage in cliched outbreaks of priapic fumbling, stuttering and falling over. Elsewhere, Sean Pertwee wanders around wondering whatever happened to his long-lost status as a young Britflick superstar in the making, while a sad-looking Bert Kwouk gamely bids to console himself by recalling he once made box-office hits with Peter Sellers.

Most unforgivably, Honest has a comedy Alzheimer's sufferer in the person of Grandpa Carter. In the innately hilarious Alzheimer's manner, he lusts after his granddaughters, smokes dope and sets his house ablaze. Honest? It fails to make the grade, Mr Grade.