The Channel Four series Trespasses is based on a book by Louise Kennedy. It is a cautionary story in many ways. Young women in their early twenties watching it will conclude that you would need to be a bit daft to fall madly in love with a much older married man who has earned a reputation for shagging around. Actors watching it would be well advised to conclude that a Belfast accent is so hard to nail properly that it is best to give the job to a local.

Gillian Anderson plays a lower middle class woman from somewhere in the greater Belfast area who is coping with the recent death of her husband by filling her house with empty gin bottles. It’s not a bad performance and she even gets to say things like “he’s a wee dote”, but she really does struggle with the vowel sounds and local usages. No one in that part of the world says “shall” unless they are deliberately trying to be posh and “if I was you” is about eight thousand times more commonly used than “if I were you”.

This is not me being pedantic. A Bulgarian chum even noticed that Anderson wasn’t getting it quite right. If someone from Bulgaria can hear the duff sounds then you know something isn’t working.

Tom Cullen who plays Michael Agnew has an easier time as his character is a posh Protestant lawyer who would have been more dialectally fluid.

Lola Pettigrew, who played IRA bomber Dolours Price in the excellent drama Say Nothing which is shortly to be shown on Channel Four is Cushla Lavery, a young teacher in a Catholic school. Some of the scenes set there are among the most irritating in the series. We are invited to believe that two junior members of staff could elbow the headteacher and priest off an assembly stage and hold onto their jobs. We are also asked to believe that the senior staff would publicly humiliate a child from a mixed marriage, the local euphemism for Protestants marrying Catholics.

What is much more believable is that mixed families in loyalist areas would receive the same sort of harassment and intimidation that Catholic families would. The estate in west Belfast where we moved was purpose built for families which had been forced out and included some mixed couples. There is an expression “keep your head lower than a Larne Catholic’s” meaning do nothing which draws attention to yourself if you want to avoid being harassed. It doesn’t always work.

Cushla falls in love with Michael in a mid-1970s Romeo and Juliet with a grim looking Irish seaside town substituting for the medieval splendour of Verona. It is love across the sectarian divide with an awful lot of shagging. Perhaps influenced by Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, the rich barrister maintains an apartment for his trysts.

Michael introduces poor Cushla to jazz and his friend’s art exhibition. He also broadens her horizons by serving meals with garlic. When she tries the same with her family they act as if they had been feed strychnine. This was not an uncommon reaction at the time.

The violence in the six counties is the backdrop to the romance. Michael is representing IRA prisoners, the TV in the pub where Cushla sometimes works is always on and every item is about someone being murdered or a bomb going off. That is authentic, as is the representation of the British army as a group of armed thugs wilfully provoking people in the hope of starting a bit of trouble. Less convincing is that the IRA would confuse a defence barrister with a judge and shoot him because he wore a wig. However, the young IRA volunteer is shown quite sympathetically and he was an early fan of Dr. Feelgood. In a sign of changing times he has a scene speaking Irish to Cushla when she visits him in prison.

At heart Trespasses is another reworking of the old story of people who are being socially pressurised to avoid each other falling in love. Kneecap’s track Fenian C*nt deals with the same theme from the other side of the wall. In this case it has been updated to ride the wave of post Derry Girls six county cool. It is a decent enough melodrama and for some of us half of the entertainment is commenting loudly on what it gets right and what it gets wrong, Gillian Anderson’s vowels being the best example.