Last night’s TV was a tad scant on new offerings, but I tuned in to Trinity on ITV2 hoping that this new series would live up to its promise. Said promise was made by the show’s executive producer, Ash Atalla, who described the show as “high-octane, ball-breaking drama”.

Well, if there was any high-octane or ball-breaking, I missed it. What I did find however was a show that, yet again, tried to sample bits of previously successful shows and roll them into a ‘new’ format. And it didn’t work. Not even a little bit.

The concept of the show is that at a posh college, there’s something sinister afoot. The show centred around the new term starting and immediately lobbed a ton of back-stories at us to establish the sinister subtext. But it was done with a heavy hand and they may as well have put up subtitles or flashed the point of the scene up on a big board.

There’s a secret society and it was all Camelot this and Galahad that, and the show almost yelled, “THESE ARE PEOPLE TO BE SCARED OF”, quite unnecessarily because the majority of us viewers aren’t retards and had guessed as much.

On top of that, there were random scenes of what I can only describe as stupidity, gratuitous titillation and aggressively done aggression. There were two stoners being pee’d upon while hiding in a bin, a God fearing girl so shocked by the sight of a naked man that she felt somehow behoved to abandon all her principles and hop on the good foot and do the bad thing.

There were swot types, hunky types, glamour model girl types, and on the faculty, socially conscious types who wanted to throw open the doors of the college to the great unwashed instead of keeping it among the more traditional Hooray Henry sorts. And opposing that advance were the Hooray Henrys, including the dean.

There was drug taking, boozing, sex, a stab at social commentary and, as I mentioned, an attempt to introduce the menacing undertones at the college, complete with some of the characters having dodgy American accents. All of this parlayed into a drama that tried too hard, and in doing so, achieved little.