It's 2007 in an ITV boardroom: long before Downton Abbey appeared on our screens and years since the channel came up with anything of note.  Scrabbling around at the bottom of the barrel for ideas, a creative plucks from the ether the two most random shows he can think of and mashes them together. "I know", he pipes up, “think Skins mixed with The Demon Headmaster”. And so Trinity was born.

Starting a show off on ITV 2 is, to quote Geoffrey Howe, “rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.” It's always going to be a disaster, so you wonder why they ever bother in the first place. Predictably, Trinity was like almost all other ITV 2 shows: so bad it was good, but not good enough not to be cancelled after the first series.

It starts offdoing exactly what it says on the tin: lots of beautiful, overly-priviliged young people boozing and having copious amounts of sex in the opulent surroundings of what the producers think an Oxbridge college looks like. There's all the stock characters here: arrogant public schoolboy and head of the Bullingdon-style Dandelion Club Dorian (Christian Cooke), his leggy cousin Rosalind (Isabella Calthorpe), fresh from 'the street' state-school kid Theo (Reggie Yates) and the patrician Dean of the college, Dr Edmund Maltravers (Charles Dance).

It takes on a darker (and more ridiculous) tone as it is revealed that Maltravers is perfecting some sort of bio-weapons programme in a  Bond-villain style lab in the basement of the college.  He uses the super fit  college rowers  as guinea-pigs and kills them off one-by-one as the experients go awry.

Frustratingly, it doesn't look like the writers have thought the plot through and actually not very much is done to progress towards revealing exactly what Maltravers is up to and who his shady American backers are. It looks like they were leaving it all to a second series from which, thankfully, we've all been spared, the only mystery being why the highly respected Dance ever agreed to appear in this most ill-concieved of shows.