Stepping into the shoes of the acclaimed and long-running Waking the Dead as the BBC’s lead crime drama was always going to be a challenge. Yet given that The Body Farm is a spin-off and thus shares some of the same characters and crew, it is difficult to see how they managed to produce a series opener as turgid and lifeless as last Tuesday night’s offering.

The faux-gothic opening sets the overblown tone for the rest of the episode: brooding forensic scientist Eve Lockhart (Tara FitzGerald) tramps through a rain-sodden, lightning-forked forest replete with not very realistic bodies lying prone in the mud, ready and waiting for FitzGerald to arrive spouting a pretentious soliloquy about tracking down the killer: “My promise to the murderer is this: I will find you. When you took that innocent life, you unknowlingly left a new trail.”

Lockhart leads a team of scientists-for-hire who while away the days between episodes watching donated bodies decompose and conducting implausible, dubious experiments on each other. For reasons unknown, the slightly unhinged one has had a dead man’s skin transplanted onto his back.

Interrupting their bizzare idyll, DCI Craig Hale (Keith Allen with all the personality sucked out of him) calls them in to help him get to the bottom of why a bathroom in a soon-to-be-demolished block of flats has every concievable surface coated with liquidised flesh.

Despite having played the character for a good few years in Waking the Dead, FitzGerald doesn't know quite who Tara is supposed to be,alternating between introverted, socially-awkward scientist and chain-smoking, pouty temptress. Allen gives a solid performance as a grumpy, world-weary cop (complete with the standard-issue  troubled background) but has been written into a corner, seemingly giving him little room to develop as the series progresses.

The rest of the cast are instantly forgettable: hunky anthropologist Mike, Oggy – suffering from an unspecified mental disorder – and annoyingly chipper, implausibly young Rose, who looks like she's there because of a fuck-up in assigning work experience.

As with other forensic science-based shows, The Body Farm goes on unbelievable pseudo-scientific flights of fancy – Eve's love interest and sidekick Mike uses a swarm of Tsetse flies to look for traces of blood in the building's plumbing – detracting from what is otherwise a disconcertingly realistic portrayal of urban decay.

Populated by two-dimensional characters stalking through gore-splattered rooms, it feels like a Silent Hill game. All except that the dialogue is even more stilted and you don’t get to chop stuff in half with a chainsaw.

With so many other tried-and-tested shows returning in the coming weeks, there are far more worthy  calls on your viewing time than the undeserved successor to one of the Beeb's most popular shows of the last decade.