PARANOID, STV, 9pm

A SUNNY playground, filled with children, balloons and bubbles: it’s obvious something dreadful is about to happen.

This new eight-part drama stars Robert Glenister and it opens with the murder of a young mother who is stabbed to death as she pushes her son on the swings.

A hooded figure comes stomping into the park and stabs her repeatedly, but there are no immediate clues as to his identity. “Twenty-two witnesses and no-one saw a face?” asks one of the detectives in disbelief.

A passerby, played by Lesley Sharp, snatched the toddler away from the knifeman and in giving her statement to the police, reveals herself to be calm and perceptive. She is a Quaker and invites Glenister’s anxious, trembling detective to her group therapy sessions. He scorns her help but the pair soon grow closer.

The murdered woman was a GP, so was this an attack from a disturbed patient? “These people are left to run wild!” complains her father. CCTV gives the cops the lead they’re looking for but when they find the suspect the case cannot be simply closed.

RED DWARF, DAVE, 9pm

THE cult comedy returns for a new series, its 11th eleventh, but I do wish they’d just let it drift around in the nostalgic, starry ether where it belongs. Give us repeats, by all means, but an 11th series? It just seems like they’re tampering with a good thing and might do it some damage.

Nonetheless, the very existence of Red Dwarf raises questions about the BBC’s comedy judgement. They revived so many old sitcoms recently, like Goodnight Sweetheart and Are You Being Served? but they didn’t touch Red Dwarf. It doesn’t deserve to be ignored and exiled to Dave.

Tonight’s opening episode involves a good old sci-fi staple: time travel.

The boys visit 1920s America where a different type of Prohibition is in force. In this version of America, it’s not alcohol which has been banned, but science and technology. It’s been outlawed by a race of aliens who have “travelled back to the past to change the present.” So can they defeat the alien rulers and halt their evil regime?