Grantchester, TV review: It took less than two minutes for James Norton to strip to his swimming trunks

The charming vicar was falsely accused of sexual assault in the new series of the ITV show

‘The Road to Grantchester’ is the perfect TV tie-in for those who will miss the ‘Grantchester’ series (ITV)

There comes a time in every young male actor's life when he must give in to the whims of his audience and pull what is commonly known as a Poldark. So it was that we were less than two minutes into a new series of Grantchester before James Norton's dashing, conflicted vicar Sidney Chambers was stripped to his swimming trunks and plunging into the River Cam.

Unfortunately for Sidney, things swiftly took a more unpleasant turn as the charming vicar was falsely accused of sexual assault and a dark tale of jealousy, lies, familial abuse and unwanted teenage pregnancy slowly unfurled.

One of the most interesting things about Grantchester is that it's nowhere near as bucolic as it pretends to be. On the surface it's all honey-coloured houses and leafy trees casting dappled shadows on the cobbled streets but James Runcie's books, ably adapted by Daisy Coulam, are far more concerned with the difference between genuine faith and the false pieties spouted by people with a great deal to hide.

Thus while the story of poor Abigail Redmond (Gracie Brooke) was one we've often heard before – young girl with difficult family life finds herself seduced by promise of fame, everything goes horribly, tragically wrong – what was more interesting was the way in which Grantchester dealt with it. There were no easy answers. Not for Robson Green's Inspector Keating, who oversaw his own version of waterboarding on a young teenage suspect. Not for Abigail Redmond's friends, all of them complicit in hiding her secrets. Not for her family who abused and spied on her. Not for the man whose wandering hands ruined a teenage girl's life. Not for the Anglican priests who covered up misdeeds and talked piously of the need for vicarage families. And most of all not for Sidney, whose understanding of life's grey areas may yet fatally undermine his faith.

It was here, in these gaps between what's right and what's best, that the show was strongest. Norton, so good as a psychopath in Happy Valley, is equally great here as the one honest man in a thoroughly dishonest world. His Sidney, bruised by life and desperate to serve both God and parish (two masters who are not always in agreement), is a compassionate and deeply moral man who is increasingly forced to put on a good face to both Church and society. Can he retain his faith? The fact that there are doubts is testimony to the unusual charm of this show.

A teenage awakening of an altogether more exuberant kind was occurring over on Channel 4 as Caitlin and Caroline Moran's joyfully crude family sitcom Raised by Wolves returned for a second series. "I appreciate the continued tolerance this library has for my family," a doleful Aretha remarked as the Garry clan descended there en masse in an episode in which Germaine landed her first date, Yoko learned the truth about animal extinction and Grampy enlisted Mariah as his apprentice/slave.

Really, though, it was all about the gags. Like the creators of Airplane!, the Moran sisters understand that if you write a huge number of one-liners it won't matter if the odd one fails to land. From the Ghostbusters references to the dismissal of Aretha as an "angry Miss Jean Brodie" and the use of "Corbyning" as a verb, this was a hyper-literate, hugely entertaining half-hour.