Clean Sweep is a serviceable, perfectly watchable Irish thriller, if you can get past its many credulity-stretching twists and its frequent excursions into the just plain silly. Peaky Blinders’ Charlene McKenna is Shelly Mohan, a busy mother of three whom we first meet as she is frantically scrubbing something red and sticky out of her clothing. As the whole series is bathed in that grey-blue nordic noir light, we can safely assume that she hasn’t just dropped spaghetti bolognese down her front.
It then steps back in time by a few hours to tell us how Shelly got to the Lady Macbeth stage of her day. She is having trouble sleeping, the family is “a little over-extended financially”, and her husband Jason (Barry Ward), who happens to be a Garda, is a womaniser who is never at home. The three kids have difficulties of their own: the youngest, Niall, has cystic fibrosis; middle child Caitlin is going through puberty; and her eldest, Derek, is a weed-smoking bad boy who lies and tries to steal money out of his mother’s handbag.
