Annie Griffin is an acquired taste, one I picked up a few years back when the first series of The Book Group came to Channel 4.  The American writer-director has a sharp eye for the social games we play that mask our baser urges,and creates exquisitely awkward comedies from what happens when the personal agendas of different people interplay in the same space.

As with The Book Group and Festival, New Town is set in Annie’s adopted home of Edinburgh, depicted with the sharp eyes and ears of an unusually observant people watcher.  The story centres on an exclusive area of the city noted for Georgian architecture.  The characters are a wealthy bunch for the most part, and much of the story concerns Purves & Pekkala, two pretentious architects and their adopted son.

It also involves Archie Linklater, who as head of Scottish Heritage is in charge of preserving New Town’s character, and a wife who pressures her solicitor husband into buying a new home for them there.  “Normal people want things to be nicer and nicer and that’s what life is all about,” is her argument, and it’s typical of Griffin’s writing that she camouflages truly chilling sentiments in innocuous language.

The core of the tale is that the two architects are stuck designing kitchens for people who don’t, in their eyes, deserve them.  They’re a creepy Gilbert & George style combo, dressed identically in minimalist grey suits with a triangle of red handkerchief just so.  We first see them refusing to let one of their clients put a decorative tile into the kitchen they’ve designed for her, insisting it will grow on her within a year.  This isn’t the work they want to be doing however, and a property developer offers them the opportunity to redevelop the interior of a classic Playfair designed church, a temptation that literally gets them drooling.

Naturally, things don’t go according to plan.  Purves and/or Pakkala push Archie Linklater off the roof of the church, an incident that ripples throughout the story.  There’s a double whammy for the architects, who are first told that their benefactor now wants to turn the church into a carpark, and ultimately discover that Linklater was pressured into approving the first redevelopment plan, by an estate agent doing her bit to stimulate the local economy.   Crime doesn’t pay after all, it turns out.

There are other elements to the story, which arguably make it a bit too scattershot in its impact.  Personally, I like that Griffin works on a big canvas, and enjoyed seeing other strands, such as the naive and headstrong island lass who comes to Edinburgh to study art and is unsettled to discover her love for drawing landscapes doesn’t help her fit in with other, more sophisticated, students.

Ultimately it’s that storyline which provides New Town’s conclusion, as the island girl reflects on what she’s learned from her art tutor: she does indeed learn to draw what she sees in her mind rather than literally portraying what she sees outside…but what she draws is still in the ‘realistic’ mode she prefers.  This is familiar territory for Griffin, who is sceptical about the more fanciful attitudes of artists and those in their social orbit, but is all in favour of people exploring the creative urge.

It’s a shame that this sharp sixty minuter was tucked away on BBC4 on Valentine’s Day, with no pre-publicity that I came across.  If you come across it, or anything else with Annie Griffin’s name on it, I urge you to set some time aside and treat yourself.