EVERY crime show needs a cliff hanger. And so it came to pass that the penultimate episode of Scott & Bailey (Sunday, ITV) saw DC Janet Scott fighting for her life in hospital.

Although, given her name is in the title, and she’s the brighter of 21st century Manchester’s Cagney & Lacey cop duo, it’s unlikely she will end up on the post-mortem slab.

Even if every viewer in the land suspected the twitchy brother of a murdered schoolfriend before kindly Scott did, the brutal stabbing in her own home still had the shock factor.

OK, so the scriptwriters are hardly Stieg Larssons, but the characters are likeable and developing from their initial caricatures, there’s a healthy work/life plot balance and the dialogue’s sharp.

The best example of this is DCI Gill Murray; the girls’ stern boss often steals the show with her crisp tongue, but this week had her human side exposed as her philandering ex-husband returned to humiliate her.

Infidelity is a key theme – if they’re not cheating they’re being cheated on – the worst offender being Rupert Grave’s smarmy married barrister bedding a juror to get a gangster acquitted.

Scott & Bailey has been criticised for being predictable. But in its defence, this instalment proves its getting into its stride: more of the same please, ITV.

Anyway, what’s predictable about a boy killing his younger sister, murdering women of her age for 30 years and then enlisting a detective to solve the mystery in her own time?

He must have a screw loose.

The first half an hour of Sirens (Monday, Channel 4), a new comedy about three male paramedics living the dream in Leeds, was enough to make anyone feel mentally unstable for tuning in.

The premise was promising, if a little ‘Scrubs’. Ashley, Rachid and Stuart are just lads who happen to save people.

Within two minutes on screen, the trio’s leader Stuart (Rhys Thomas) was crouched by a car mangled in a road crash, his hand inside the driver’s chest cavity to re-start her heart – after silencing the Bryan Adams ballad emitting from the vehicle’s stereo.

So far, so good. But the slow storyline – cynical know-it-all Stuart says he can ‘beat biology’ and fights against the ‘Up, horny, down’ mood swings after a traumatic event – soon left the show in need of life support.

The supposedly cheeky scenes will surely prove too tame and tired for a generation raised on gross-out Hollywood blockbusters. Things picked up in the later stages, with Stuart inching towards endearing rather than plain irritating, but the whole drawn out hour could have been halved.

Schedulers are probably hoping Sirens will fill the comedy-drama void left by Teachers. But it had more characters, random donkey extras and a likeable lead in Andrew Lincoln.

Unless Rhys Thomas grows on the audience, Sirens will be booking into a Switzerland clinic.

New York is where Made In Chelsea (Monday, E4) rich girl Caggie jetted off to in the season finale.

Surprisingly, she wasn’t fleeing the country because she and her hideously wealthy friends had made an even worse ‘soap’ than the Only Way is Essex morons.

No. In a poor imitation of Richard Curtis’s Love Actually airport ‘chase’, she bid a painfully staged goodbye to her Romeo, the wooden yet slightly slimy Spencer, only for him to realise – too late – that she was The One and try to stop her.

It proved an unsatisfying denouement for the glam series’ sole storyline of any consequence. Especially given that Spencer’s so loaded, he could credibly hop on the next flight in pursuit with all the care of a mortal catching a Number 7 bus.