Inside Men is a new drama series centring on a messy heist in a cash sorting office, with a title that seems deliberately ambiguous.

The three male leads are all Inside Men in the sense that they're in on the robbery, but the name of the show also relates to the fact we get an impression of how these gentlemen function, what their motivations are and how they act under pressure. That much was clear even in the opening five minutes, as we were thrown into the action after a caption saying 'September' preceded the violence of the robbery before we'd even seeing the opening titles.

The trio of unlikely criminals is made up of Chris (Ashley Walters), Marcus (Warren Brown) and John (Steven Mackintosh), each of them believable and, for the most-part, sympathetic characters. Chris is a security guard at the plant who's just about scraping by whilst Marcus is in the dispatch department, with an immediate three grand debt he's struggling to pay off. Between these two, after we've flashed back to February, they cook up a failsafe scheme to nab £50,000 to split between them. And they would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for the big boss, John, keeping his beady eye on them from his raised office platform, where he spends his days fretting over Excel spreadsheets showing clear deficits, sometimes popping to the cashpoint to make up any lost funds from his own pocket. All three are struggling, and it's clear they'll come together at some point.

After John clocks Chris taking delivery of a brand new sofa he wises up to their game (hasn't the idiot security guard seen Goodfellas? Whatever you do, for God's sake 'don't buy anything!'), in the excellent closing scenes, he demands to know how they did it and, going against type, calls them out for thinking too small.

It's a great turnaround in his character. Where before he seemed a rather impotent, nebbish little man, he suddenly becomes a much shrewder and ruthless customer than you might have given him credit for - and all of it brilliantly performed by Mackintosh in a show that has solid performances throughout, demanding that you tune in for the second part, next Thursday.