Grace: how new Brighton detective series became most-watched show on UK television for second Sunday running

Peter James, author of the long-running series of novels featuring Brighton detective Roy Grace, has tweeted his delight at the news.

The first episode, which was screened last year, gained excellent viewing figures. Episodes two and three, which went out last Sunday and the Sunday before, are now surely setting the series up for a third season. The anticipation is that filming for a third season would start in the summer.

In the meantime, this Sunday coming and the following Sunday, we have got episodes four and five of season two.

Click here for our review of last Sunday's episode

Peter has got a lovely sense that it is gelling perfectly.

Also hugely pleasing is the sense that all the actors have really truly found their roles in the piece: “I do think they have really grown into the characters and I really do sense a difference. I felt in the first one with Dead Simple that it was really good but it was not totally a sense of a team working together, but now you do definitely get that.

“You get a real sense of John (Simm as Roy Grace) and Richie (Campbell as DS Glenn Branson) working together and really becoming a partnership. And it is also great to have Craig Parkinson as DS Norman Potting.

“When I first created Grace I had Alun Armstrong in mind. He would have been the ideal Grace back then, I thought, but really things have just moved on so much. Certainly the kind of Norman Potting character just certainly wouldn't be in the police anymore. I've had to update him in a way and Craig is great. Taking a throwaway line Craig can still really show you that he really is not very PC at the same time”

Have you read: Grace: why Roy Grace creator Peter James is so delighted with John Simm’s portrayal of his Brighton-based detective

And things got even more interesting with the third episode last Sunday as an element of romance starts to be introduced for Grace. In the show and in the books, Grace's wife had inexplicably and completely disappeared six years before. In the forthcoming episode Zoe Tapper joins the cast as Cleo, a new love interest…

“She has got a fantastic warmth about her and is a very good leading lady and I know how important that is from my own experience and from my own bad experience, in fact. If you don't have the right chemistry, then a film is always going to fall flat. It just does not matter how good the plot is. But you watch John and Zoe together (as Grace and Cleo) and it is just absolutely right. You remember that great line about Marilyn Monroe that Tony Curtis said, that kissing her was like kissing Hitler, but with John and Zoe you get exactly the opposite. It is just electric.”

It will give us an important new insight into Grace as the romance develops.