Not to say that my mind is all over the place but before I get serious about desks, there’s a story from childhood we need to half remember. I want to say that it’s from Br’er Rabbit but given my age that would mean I got it from Disney’s “Song of the South” and you and I are not going there today, so we’ll forget half of this and remember just the bit about how the rabbit does something bad. He’s done whatever it is, someone is going to tell on him, but he gets to put his spin first and so he’s fine.

The first version you hear is the one you believe, the one you prefer.

And quite rigidly so. I had to talk with a rabid Trump supporter the other day and she insisted, insisted, insisted on how everyone should check their sources and they must, must, must seek out all opposing points of view throughout Fox News.

Anyway.

For reasons I cannot tell you — and that you would not give one pixel of a toss about if I could — I’ve been required this week to watch a couple of episodes of “Patience”. I’ve seen several before, though as it happens not these two, and it’s a good show. Except since I saw it before, I’ve been watching the original French series it’s based on. If you don’t happen to know it, its “Astrid et Raphaelle” but streams in the UK on Channel 4 under the title “Astrid: Murder in Paris”.

It’s excellent. I was recently invited onto a radio show to recommend TV shows to binge on and I immediately wanted Astrid to be the series I enthuse about — but I’d been beaten to it by at least one person before me. I felt robbed.

Both these French and British shows are police procedurals in which an autistic woman working in a police criminal records department helps solve crimes. As ever with pitch lines, it doesn’t sound great and it does sound contrived. It sounds like the way Quincy was a medical examiner but he would go out on cases because that’s where the cameras were. Or how Charlie’s Angels would fight any crime, but preferred ones involving going undercover in bikini fashion shows. Someone’s got to do it.

No question, Astrid and Patience are contrived. The original eventually addresses this at length and turns it into a problem for the characters instead of for us as viewers. And the English-language version actually comments on it very early on. The core problem is that this lead woman is a civilian and there have to be regulations and laws and procedures that she violates by becoming part of the various investigations. If that sounds like nitpicking, like I know my Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984), then follow: Astrid/Patience have difficulty crossing a police line because only authorised people can. The two versions of this character stand there at the tape, unable to move until specifically authorised. You really feel for her, this difficulty is very well conveyed and that’s what makes these shows compelling, but it also means that whether I care about detail or not, they do, so skipping around the issue is TV logic.

Although, okay, you’re still thinking I nitpick because I knew that PACE act was 1984. In which case, let me pick: one episode of Patience I watched this week opens with a woman listening to her huge smartphone over wired headphones and it made me grumble. There’s no law that says a character has to have a new phone, but it was such a big one that it seemed new, seemed to be one of the more recent large-screen models. Yet it’s nine years since iPhones had a headphone jack and five since Samsung removed them too.

I can say this to you and I can say that the French original of this same episode did not have the same mistake in its version of the same scene, the same story. But then there are things I prefer in the British version, others I prefer in the French, and it’s all bits and things. I’d like to know why certain key decisions were made that make the stories different, but I can’t say one choice is better than another and normally I feel I can. I don’t mean I’m right or that you’d agree with me, I mean I can’t think of another example where I haven’t got both an very definite preference and reasons I think back it up.

For instance, this week I was also listening to Sheryl Crow’s version of Mississippi, a song I only recently learned was written by Bob Dylan. Then I listened to Dylan’s version. It’s so different as be practically laughable: it’s fine, it isn’t funny really, but it’s so dour and miserable compared to Crow’s version that it sounds like it was deliberately intended to sound miserable.

So in that case, easy. I prefer Crow’s take. But then I heard hers first. Just as I heard her version of “Sweet Child O’Mine” first and like it enormously, while people who first heard the original Guns N’ Roses version apparently do not.

Everybody prefers the first Doctor they saw in Doctor Who. Strictly Come Dancing is better made than Dancing with the Stars, if you see them that way around. The Princess Bride is an incredibly better novel than it is a film, unless you saw the film first and now entirely incorrectly believe that the novel is a shrug in comparison.

It’s not like either you or I sit here making up star ratings for things, but almost as if it’s a rule, I think there tends to be one version you like and one I think is at best an interesting copy.

I prefer “Astrid: Murder in Paris” to “Patience”.

Yet if all you can possibly get from this mess in my head is that I’m recommending Astrid, I am also recommending Patience. Perhaps if you’ve read this far, that’s what you need.

I’m just fascinated by two versions of anything and what sticks with you, what seems to land. During this week’s viewing, for instance, I kept being struck by how the lead detective’s desk is in the wrong place.

That’s the lesson here, as a viewer, as a recovering TV critic, as a writer. It is vital for drama that you arrange the furniture correctly.

And you thought the headphones thing was weird.