Rating:

Gin bottles in Mammy's handbag. Gin under the bed. Gin in the cushions, gin in the wardrobe, gin in every compartment of the chest of drawers. Gin in the toilet cistern.

At the end of the second episode of Trespasses, primary school teacher Cushla (Lola Petticrew) searches the house for her mother's hidden stashes of booze, and finds enough to fill Belfast docks.

Mammy (Gillian Anderson) isn't merely pickled in alcohol, she's drowning in it. And Trespasses, a four-part adaptation of Louise Kennedy's debut novel, is floundering just as deep in an ocean of misery.

It's as though the cast, plunged into this vivid evocation of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, knocked back a double of wretchedness with a pint of melancholy to chase it down — and then couldn't stop.

Now, it's a lock-in, and they're drinking the place dry of every form of unhappiness — sectarian hatred, futility, jealousy, child poverty, violence . . . all under a leaden blanket of depression.

And if that's not enough to suck the joy out of existence, it's set to a soundtrack of the worst 1970s pop that ever made you want to take a hammer to your transistor radio. Is there anyone alive who wanted to hear Billy — Don't Be A Hero by Paper Lace again?

Catholic Cushla teaches reading and art to eight-year-olds. She's fending off advances from Gerry (Oisin Thompson), a fellow teacher with a flowery shirt, a guitar and sideburns like blackberry bushes gone wild.

The pair of them try to keep the wee kiddies from being indoctrinated with anti-Protestant prejudice by their head teacher, a bug-eyed bigot whose beard is singed by his own halitosis.

In her evenings, she works in the family pub with her brother Eamonn (Martin McCann), getting leered at by British soldiers and the 'peelers' or police.

When a middle-aged lawyer steps in to save her from a groping, she mistakes him for a knight in shining armour.

In fact, Michael (Tom Cullen) is married and a serial womaniser. He's also a crusading anti-Government solicitor, defying the Loyalists to defend IRA terrorists. Cushla plunges into an affair with him, having lots of soft-porn sex in his bachelor pad, his office and even by the roadside.

Mammy suspects she's up to something, but she's too sloshed to connect the clues. Gillian Anderson throws herself into every gin-sodden fight, but the character is too one-dimensional for her to make anything memorable of the scenes. She's either drunk at breakfast, drunk in front of the telly or staggering drunk out of the house.

We're meant to believe Cushla and Michael are burning alive in a doomed romance across the divide. All I can see is a creepy older bloke, copping off with a naive teacher who thinks she's a character from classic literature.

It's all as unpalatable as the dregs of gin in Mammy's handbag.