TV Pick of the Week: Clean Sweep - review by Yvette Huddleston

She plays Shelly Mohan a busy wife and mother whose daily life mostly consists of looking after her surly teenage stepson Derek (Rhys Mannion) her bright pre-teen daughter Caitlin (Katelyn Rose Downey) and her laconic youngest son Niall (Aidan McCann), who has cystic fibrosis. Plus, cleaning, shopping and cooking for the whole family. On top of that there are the regular physio appointments for Niall and dealing with the passive aggressive nightmare of the primary school PTA. All this to cope with and her police officer husband Jason (Barry Ward) is a womanizing workaholic who rarely seems to be at home.

Shelly is feisty and capable though – and she is a survivor. This becomes ever more apparent as the series goes on. In the opening episode we find Shelly in her utility room desperately scrubbing at some clothing that is covered in what looks like blood. The narrative then flashes back a few hours. As she is bundling the kids into the car to give them a lift to school, we get a glimpse of a mysterious bearded man watching her from across the road. He later approaches her while she is food shopping and it transpires that he is someone from her past who she really is not pleased to see. She agrees to meet him later at his hotel – first stopping off at home to pick up a gun and a disguise. Needless to say, their encounter does not end well.

And who is in charge of the subsequent murder investigation? Shelly’s husband Jason, of course. Intercut with the main narrative are flashbacks to Shelly’s former life, which was quite different to her cosy middle-class present. The tension and the jeopardy mounts as Shelly attempts to keep her true identity secret and to evade arrest – not easy as a witness saw her leaving the hotel around the time of the killing. Jason’s colleague Fiona (Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle), with whom it is implied he has had some sort of a fling, is suspicious of Shelly from the start and tries to steer Jason’s investigation in the right direction. Gary Tieche and Fran Harris’s script skilfully keeps things on a knife-edge and the conclusion is satisfyingly ambiguous.