By William Gallagher BBC News Online

Midway though this dramatisation of the Shipman murder case, a policeman examining the doctor's computer system raises an eyebrow and says: "I'm inside him."

No-one else is.

There is no insight, not even any clear attempt to bring us inside the mind of this man. Instead, it is a straight, plodding account.

One cannot come to it cold - it is impossible to unlearn what we know of Shipman and be surprised as the story unfolds.

So the drama has no option but to jump right into the story. Instead of slowly drawing us into the lives of the characters, Shipman murders a patient almost immediately.

Shipman was convicted of murdering 15 of his elderly female patients

One could say the story starts strongly and has some pace.

Stereotypical

But while the plot has no option but to get straight to the point, the performances do not have to be blatant.

Yet James Bolam plays Shipman with an evil glint right from the start.

Bolam is bound here to a script that is unvarying and shallow, that keeps Shipman as a one-note caricature, almost a black-hat villain.

Equally, James Hazeldine's DI Stan Egerton is not a policeman under pressure, he is the hero pursuing the bad guy.

Bolam and Hazeldine are both exceptional actors. They need to be, because all the roles are one-dimensional ciphers solely there to advance the plot.

Some of the supporting performances by characters such as one-scene doctors in hospitals are very poor indeed and the dialogue is uniformly clich�d.

Restricted

Toward the end Hazeldine's character talks at length to a priest (Gareth Thomas) and the scenes are simply dreadful.

It is not dialogue, not conversation, not debate, it is a list of points that the script could not fit in anywhere else.

You get a sense that the story is accurate, that it has stuck rigidly to every detail, but while you would not want fabrication, drama needs more to it than fact and writer Michael Eaton has had his hands tied.

This is not drama at all, it is a very long Crimewatch reconstruction. It does not involve us in the story, but trades exclusively on the horror we already feel.

There is a question over whether this is cashing in on a horrific story, and whether drama has a right to examine topics that are still fresh.

I would say it does have that right - documentary can tell you the facts and the statistics but a good drama makes you feel the emotion involved.

Unfortunately, Shipman does not.

Shipman is on ITV1 at 2100 BST on Tuesday.