With what seems like about five different plotlines strung across a whole continent and and thirty-odd years, a good handful of murders, a government headed by a corrupt prime minister on the verge of collapse, and a cast of brooding and implausibly good-looking characters, new BBC drama Hidden has all the hallmarks of a promising and appropriately bewildering conspiracy thriller.

Phillip Glenister – just as grumpy and unorthodox as his most famous incarnation, Gene Hunt in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes – is former criminal turned small-time solictor Harry Venn, approached by mysterious high-flying fellow lawyer (so she says) Gina Hawkes (Thekla Reuten, In Bruges). With a flutter of her eyelashes and a promise of twenty grand and information about the demise of his brother in a botched robbery (death number one), Hawkes gets Venn to root out a shady character from his past who she thinks has evidence that will get one of her own clients off a murder charge (death number two).

All this is set against a backdrop patchwork of familiar political turmoil: a Britain racked by daily riots and temporarily without a functioning government, as PM Brian Worsley tries to piece together a new coalition following the collapse of the previous one amidst allegations of Worsley's financial misconduct.  Ambitious young minister Alexander Wentworth conspires with a Rebekah Wade-style media mogul, played by Anna Chancellor, who not-so-subtly hands Wentworth an envelope stuffed full of information that will apparantly put Worsley in his political grave.

It is not clear how either  this or the murder of a woman (death number three) in an unspecified European city are connected to Venn, but no doubt the latter has something to do with Hawkes, whose law firm doesn't seem to exist, and whose generic continental accent would suggest she's been up to no good in everywhere and anywhere, from Paris to Moscow.

The first episode is appropriately pacy and intriguing from start to finish, upon which Venn's office explodes in a spectacular cliffhanger, though the breathtaking speed comes in part from the introduction of a bewildering number of characters, some of whom are played by more than one actor across both the 1970s and contemporary storylines.

The attempts to make it hyper-contemporary give it a powerful immediacy but feel a little forced – to the extent that you half expect Amanda Knox to dance across the screen singing a line from that Soup Dragons song "I'm free to do what I want, any old time."

That said, Hidden does look like it might well be one of the BBC's most accomplished political thrillers, boasting as it does a sharp, brilliantly observed script, a well-assembled cast of both famous and lesser-known names, and admirable willingness to get audiences to use their brains rather than play to the lowest common  denominator.