Coiling ridiculous plot around a nauseating premise – babies swapped at birth, one of the parents is a hellish sociopath – makes for a hollow and unpleasant watch. This is the very worst of modern television

The brazenly ludicrous TV thriller has its place. Sometimes it’s fun to throw all logic and sense to the wind and surrender to a bananas plot whose twists and turns – which play out amid huge, aspirationally spotless homes and gorgeous vistas – are so entertaining and hilariously camp that you end up glued to the screen. Unfortunately, Playing Nice does not fit this mould. Yes, it’s a frantically tense drama, set in a beautiful location, that teems with preposterous coincidences and plot developments. But it is also a story about forcibly removing preschoolers from their parents and exposing them to potentially mortal danger at the hands of a disturbed sociopath. Which, you know, isn’t really my idea of a laugh.

Playing Nice – adapted by Grace Ofori-Attah (Malpractice) from the book by JP Delaney, whose novel The Girl Before was also turned into a disappointing BBC drama – does have a compelling moral conundrum at its core. The Rileys – restaurateur-chef Maddie (Niamh Algar), stay-at-home dad Pete (James Norton, slipping in and out of a strangely high-pitched Cornish accent) and their son Theo – are a picture of down-to-earth familial joy. Until, that is, the hospital phones to inform them that Theo isn’t their biological child: recent genetic testing on another boy suggests two premature babies got mixed up in a neonatal intensive care unit three years ago. Although this is incredibly unlikely in reality (and the show’s eventual explanation for the swap is nowhere near convincing enough), it taps into a primal fear: which new mother semi-delirious with exhaustion on the postnatal ward hasn’t fleetingly feared such a scenario? And the upshot – that two couples each feel a deep-seated connection towards both children – is a complex and fascinating ethical puzzle that a better drama might have dug into. But Playing Nice – if this wasn’t already abundantly clear – is a very bad drama.