Ruthless Ron's rocky road to retirement

ANOTHER week, another gangster series. Set in Liverpool, one of the few English cities where Albanian gangs don't run the drug trade, This City Is Ours stars Sean Bean as Sheffield villain Ronnie Phelan who has built his Merseyside empire on cocaine.

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Rather than bombard us with a never-ending carousel of extreme violence, Stephen Butchard's BBC series paints a realistic portrait of patriarch Ronnie's lucrative operation.

We meet the families, including catty wives and girlfriends, take in a baptism, and see him dancing to George Gallagher's version of House Of Bamboo.

He may play golf badly but crime has served Phelan well.

He has a beautiful home on The Wirral and the kind of Spanish villa you rarely see on A Place In The Sun.

Ronnie wants to retire but needs one last jackpot to featherbed his future.

His number two, Michael Kavanagh (the magnetic James Nelson-Joyce) is reliable and efficient. But Ronnie's son Jamie, awash with jealousy, steals their cocaine from the docks with the help of Davy Crawford, not a Mensa candidate.

Episode one ended with Ronnie and Michael beating Crawford close to death.

Like many real villains, Ronnie has a sense of humour to balance his ruthless cruelty. The dialogue is decent, the women are well drawn, and there's a love story - Michael and Diana, with their IVF subplot. It's not "the Scouse Sopranos" but it is shaping up to be the best gangster drama since Ireland's Kin.

It's already more watchable than BBC1's Dope Girls and the awful Towards Zero, which not only sexed-up Agatha Christie but Americanised the courtroom scenes.