Usually, if I take an instant dislike to a TV show I turn it off. I didn’t think much of ITV’s Grace when it started four years ago, but I stuck with it because it’s filmed in and around Brighton, my home ‘manor’. The first episode of the current fourth series reached its climax on the bank of the river Ouse in Newhaven, a bare mile from where I live.

This week’s episode (3 of 4) had corruption within the police unit as its theme. It was a pale shadow of Line of Duty, which has kept us on the edge of our seats for six series slowly unravelling an endless seam of corruption. Line of Duty’s top-notch cast includes Vicky McClure, one of my favourite TV actresses.

If Duty is top-notch, then Grace is bottom-notch. I’m not sure who to blame, the actors or the writers, but I find each week’s episode less convincing than the previous one. This week the whole show seemed clunky, underwritten, amateurish. I don’t read the books, which are hugely popular, because I find Peter James’s style a tad bland and his plots a bit thin (I prefer US crime fiction, and Michael Connelly is my main man), but it may be the screenwriter who fails to give the actors lines they can breathe life into.

In contrast to Grace and leaving aside Line of Duty (another Final Series is now promised), BBC’s This City Is Ours is an ace show which I binged on iPlayer. James Nelson-Joyce’s Michael is reminiscent of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Sean Bean’s patriarch brought echoes of Marlon Brando’s magisterial Don Vito. There’s an “epic” feel to the production, which almost puts it above Line of Duty in the “pantheon” of UK crime drama.

My advice: don’t miss This City is Ours, but do miss Grace, unless like me you want to see which bits of Brighton they use. If this was EuroVision I’d give 12 points to This City and expect Grace to come in with nul points.