DESPAIR. Anguish. Hopelessness. A sense of 'why me'. All emotions which actress Emma Rigby would surely have experienced when watching Championship football while dating footballer Matt Mills.

Cheap shots at Championship football sides done with, the last two weeks of new BBC drama Prisoners Wives (BBC 1, Tuesdays, 9pm) will have been a revelation to anyone not familiar with Rigby's work on Hollyoaks.

Hollyoaks (C4, 6.30pm, weekdays), without being mean to our favourite hangover cure on a Sunday morning, is like most other soaps – it doesn't unearth too many stars capable of pulling off a star role in a primetime drama.

Rigby, as anyone who has seen Prisoners' Wives over the past two weeks will testify, is the exception to that rule – a real star among the suds. All those emotions I listed in the first paragraph were displayed in an utterly convincing way as Rigby filled the main role of Gemma in the BBC's newest drama.

Normally, when a red spot hovers on the head of someone within the opening minute of a drama, a bloody, gory scene follows, followed by a burst of a track by The Who … but maybe I just watch too much CSI.

In the case of Prisoners’ Wives, it was the start of something more dramatic – the shattering of the domestic bliss Rigby's character had enjoyed until the moment the red spot turned into a dawn raid of armed cops accusing her husband of murder.

The moment that Rigby began to realise her husband was perhaps capable of murder – discovering a gun in a biscuit tin in a family caravan tends to have that impact, I would imagine – was brilliantly delivered. And so it continued into the second episode this week which, although focusing a little more on the other wives around her, allowed Rigby to take her rightful place as a star in primetime.