ONE of the plot strands in Gold Digger, the steamy BBC “domestic noir” series, relates to domestic violence and it's being screened during the annual UN campaign to actively  challenge violence against women and girls, which ends on December 10.

It's a weekly cliff-hanger — though you can binge watch it on iPlayer until January— in which recent divorcee Julia, who's just turned 60, is pursued by the much younger Benjamin.

He couldn’t possibly love her for herself could he? It must be that  rambling mansion in rural Devon he's got his eyes on.

The presumption is that gold-digging is his motive and Julia’s son, hotshot city lawyer Patrick reveals something of a cynical world view, as much as his own character, when he declares of Benjamin: “There’s nothing like the threat of imminent homelessness to oil the wheels of romance.”

Among the paucity of kindness and empathy in this version of austerity Britain, there does not seem to be much space for love. Only Julia’s daughter Della shows compassion for Benjamin’s financial struggle.

That  bleak cynicism is evident too in the vilification of the undeserving poor. “Should we hide the silver?” cackles youngest son Leo to Julia when they leave Benjamin at the house alone with his long-lost Geordie half-brother Keiran.

The most telling line in this class-riven universe is delivered by Julia’s ex-best-friend, the ever-serene Marsha, when Benjamin attempts to smoke in her car: “I have one rule in life... never in the Aston,” she informs him.

A defining moment in the series is when Marsha, having received a text message from Julia that they are no longer friends, says nothing at all. Entombed in her glass office, she slumps in defeat.

This is the world the characters in Gold Diggers inhabit. There is no community, merely a Thatcherite assemblage of atomised characters.

Julia ought to take on more of the role of the roving, misanthropic “gumshoe” of the noir genre – embittered, not trusting of anyone, but not actually defeated. But she doesn't.

That's underscored  in the graphic domestic violence that Julia has been subjected to, and relives, but never adequately reveals to anyone beyond her traumatised adult children. And it's lurking in a potentially dangerous final confrontation with her abusive ex-husband Ted.

The message is that middle-class people suffer intimate partner violence like anyone.

But the aura of her wealth, masking the real dangers of partner violence, is not challenging enough. Julia, though isolated, is a millionaire and can afford the best legal services for her divorce and freeing herself from an abusive marriage.

The most privileged survivors of abuse can have access to such help, others perhaps not.

The absence of a wider network of friends sets Julia up for the emotional abuse and manipulation she suffers at the hands of Benjamin, whose final triumphant speech in the series is delivered almost as though it were at a political hustings or celebrating electoral victory.

The sense is that his love is as much political as it is personal but that's undermined by a storyline which challenges suspension of disbelief.

The issue is not the age gap but rather the contention that the smooth, handsome and articulate Benjamin, with his received-pronunciation diction, has made a transition from council-house estate, childhood neglect, juvenile detention for murder and  a change of identity to a successful career.

Not an impossible transition but it is an act of extraordinary social mobility, if Benjamin's story were indeed true. That needs to be shown, not told. We need to witness, and believe in, Benjamin’s hardship, “hard in a way that you could never understand.”

This highly addictive drama, well acted and shot, had the potential to dig deep due to the gravitas of its content. But it's something of a missed opportunity.

Information on the UN's 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence is available at unwomen.org and advice and guidance on domestic abuse at gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help