Aidan Smith's TV week: Vigil (BBC1), Reacher (Prime Video), The Serial Killer's Wife (Paramount+), Mary Berry's Highland Christmas (BBC1)

Tell me if this irritates you as much as it does me. Bird’s eye views of neatly arranged homes, tall forests, a lonely coast road. Every drama these days must have overhead shots making everything look Toytownesque. And the message here is: we’ve got a drone and we’re gonna use it.

So only a matter of time, I suppose, before the flying machines which provide this show-offy, overdone and often pointless footage became central to the story.

You’ll remember how the first season of the Scottish-set Vigil (BBC1) happened underwater. I love Suranne Jones, we all do, but the submarine was definitely the star. DCI investigates crime? Ho-bloody-hum. DCI investigates crime in the Firth of Clyde, hundreds of feet down, when the claustrophobia, paranoia and boredom with the vessel’s library only having dog-eared Dan Browns are bad before the leak and hardly improve when trapped inside a torpedo tube? Interesting!

When I heard there was to be a second series I half-wondered if Jones’ Amy Silva would return in a bespoke post as a confined-spaces investigator. But then I decided this would be too restrictive and she’d probably have to resort to rescuing cats from wells by the fifth run. The producers obviously thought the same so here she is gazing skywards instead of into the murky depths after an airshow outrage leaves seven dead.

Andy Murray guests in Mary Berry's Highland Christmas

How come the UCAVs - combat drones, do keep up - suddenly turned on the squaddies? Just before, Dougray Scott had been on the brink of selling some of the gizmos to the Middle East. Yes, that Dougray Scott, love his work, too, although not sure I ever envisaged him as an air vice-marshall, especially one with the keelie accident he uses for Irvine Welsh’s Crime.

The delegation in ghutrahs are from Wudyan. Heard of this country? They’re dodgy with poor human rights and journalists there having an unfortunate habit of disappearing. I guess the BBC had to invent a place so as not to potentially threaten sales of real British arms to the region. Anyway, Silva is soon in Wudyan when it’s discovered the drones were controlled from there while her partner at work and in life, DI Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), continues the investigation in Scotland, seven months pregnant being no impediment to the latter’s Spiderwoman antics on a tower block.

The connection between the two Vigils is that once again there’s reluctance on the part of the military to cooperate with the investigation. Silva won’t be deterred, I’m sure, but the story is convoluted and complicated. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I almost yearn for the distraction of some aerial film, completely fatuous and entirely unnecessary.

I’ve missed Tom Cruise’s turns as Jack Reacher, having successfully swerved most of his action movies, but the TV adaptations of Lee Child’s pulpy thrillers about an ex-military policeman still roaming America looking for baddies to bash make it difficult to imagine him in the role.

Amanda Scholey in The Serial Killer's Wife

Li’l Tommy might answer in the affirmative to the question posed by the pilot in Airplane!: “Do you ever hang around the gymnasium?” He might not allow himself to get too distracted by wives or girlfriends. And his body may be his temple albeit one which can fit on a mantlepiece or in a display cabinet. But he can’t match the sheer physical presence of Alan Ritchson and indeed I’m not sure anyone can.

Variously dubbed Big Fella and the Big One, Ritchson is not just taller than Cruise but five times as wide. At the start of the second season of Prime Video’s Reacher he’s looking for clothes in a second-hand shop, a mission that’s only going to be successful if The Incredible Hulk has just handed in some old XXXXXLs. Those muscles seem cartoon-like but they do the job as a succession of poor schmucks are minced and mushed.

First up is a car-jacker who’s ordered the woman in front of Reacher in the ATM queue to make a sizable withdrawal. Job done, our hero delivers the mother’s terrified son back to her, before being on his way again. “Wait,” she says, “who are you and how much of Popeye’s spinach and how many of Desperate Dan’s cow pies do you have to eat to get so big?” (Okay, I made the last bit up).

Size isn’t everything of course and Reacher has a neat way with a droll one-liner. In his days in uniform - in his case, presumably stitched together from a couple of tents - he’d assembled a crack unit only now his buddies turning up as corpses. Reacher returns to his hotel room to find it ransacked. “The assholes snapped my toothbrush in half - now I own nothing,” he deadpans.

Others who’ve so far survived don’t feel much like cracking jokes, with one remarking: “I’m thinking there’s something hell bent on taking out the Special Investigators and they’re coming after us.” Reacher’s reaction? “Good.”

In a crowded field, The Serial Killer’s Wife (Paramount+) decides there’s no point messing about. With so many programmes about serial killers out there - all the serial killer documentaries and serial killer reconstructions and programmes about serial killers both real and imagined - it doesn’t risk a title which may be subtle but fails to hammer home the essential serial-killerness.

Amanda Scholey is Beth, the wife. You’ll remember her from legal drama The Split; she was meant to be the wild one among the trio of sisters. Jack Farthing, who’s played villains, misfits and a younger version of King Charles before, is Tom, the well-respected doctor who’s thrown a surprise 40th birthday party and gets and even bigger surprise when he’s carted off by the police.

There’s something unsettling about this drama. The reaction to the arrest - somewhere in Kent, I think - is weird. “Great party,” one of the guests says to Beth the next morning. Then there’s Beth herself; she’s hardly beside herself with shock. And then there’s Tom’s silk-scarfed lawyer. He’s deeply disturbing.

But Tom is pretty creepy himself, not least when he gets Beth to lie about his movements to the cops investigating the murder of a woman he sacked from his surgery, while they wonder if there’s a link to another woman who’s disappeared. The Serial Killer’s Wife is brash in name but, at the outset at least, oddly subdued in other respects.

Plenty of Christmas food shows upcoming and for starters, Andy Murray. Mary Berry’s Highland Christmas (BBC1) returns the foodie by steam train to her mum’s roots, but first there’s a stop-off at the tennis superstar’s Cromlix Hotel in Dunblane to try and improve his culinary skills.

“Eggy bagels” are his speciality - in fact his only dish - but after Mary’s coaching he can whip up smoked haddock kedgeree. What does Muzza eat on the 25th? Sushi. Even wearing his thick Christmas jumper it’s obvious his body is still his temple, and that it towers over Tom Cruise’s temple. Indeed, the way he towers over Mary and his gran Shirley he looks like he could be match for The Big One.