This article was originally published in The Courier on 31st March 2018.
COME HOME: Tuesday, BBC One
INDIAN SUMMER SCHOOL: Thursday, Channel 4
Society,
with its infinite capacity for fairness and equality, has always decreed that a
woman who leaves her family is guilty of a worse crime than a man who does the
same.
Regardless
of her personal circumstances, a mother is expected to feather the nest at all
costs. Life, as all non-idiots know, is more complicated than that. The quietly
devastating drama COME HOME confronts
this stigma, this uncomfortably emotive issue, with commendable nuance and
compassion.
Christopher
Eccleston and Paula Malcomson star as Greg and Marie, a working-class couple
with three children. One day, Marie walks out on them. They’re stunned and
heartbroken. Why did she leave? Marie can only tell Greg that she felt
suffocated, which only adds to his forlorn confusion. She didn’t leave him for
someone else, she now lives alone in a house nearby.
Greg
is still in love with her. As far as he’s concerned, her actions are a
mystifying betrayal. She’s abandoned him and his beloved children. It’s not as
black and white as that, of course. We’ll find out more about Marie’s motives
as the series unfolds.
Episode
one was told from Greg’s perspective, as he struggled to rebuild his life eleven
months after Marie’s departure. A burgeoning romance with a work acquaintance
spiralled out of control when her abusive ex-partner bulldozered into their
lives. Behind her vivacious exterior, Greg’s new girlfriend is an emotionally
scarred soul who fails to bond with his understandably sceptical children. She’s
a vulnerable, tragic figure.
Eccleston,
mercifully back in his serious drama comfort zone after an embarrassing “funny
granddad” detour in The A Word,
delivers a painfully raw performance as a man drowning in heartbreak and
loneliness. His Belfast accent (Come Home
was made with support from BBC Northern Ireland) is utterly convincing, it
never distracts.
James
Nesbitt must be spitting feathers, Eccleston has effortlessly stolen his troubled Irish
everyman shoes.
The
desperately sad, discomfiting scene in which Greg begged Marie to come home was
beautifully played by Eccleston and Malcomson. We didn’t see much of her last
week, but in later episodes Malcomson handles her difficult and complex role
faultlessly. She’s superb.
Writer
Danny Brocklehurst is a protégé of Jimmy McGovern, and it shows. Like McGovern,
he spins engrossing gut-punching yarns populated by flawed characters unravelling
in a jagged moral maze.
This
is a drama we can all relate to in one way or another. We’ve all struggled to
come to terms with the end of a relationship. We’ve all suffered from loss and
regret. We’ve all, like Greg, listened to Lou Reed’s aching Pale Blue Eyes, or something similar, in
the empty dead of night.
As
hifalutin as this sounds, Come Home
is a wise and moving meditation on the fragile mess of the human condition.
It’s produced by RED, the company behind the similarly outstanding Happy Valley. If they keep this up,
they’ll have to build a fortified annex for their BAFTA storage.
In
the new documentary series INDIAN SUMMER
SCHOOL, five underperforming British schoolboys volunteer to take their failed
GCSE exams again in India’s Doon School, one of the world’s most prestigious
seats of learning.
It’s
a sympathetic culture clash experiment, refreshingly free of editorial
judgement, about undisciplined yet decent kids dealing with a strange new world
of rigid conformity. These boys genuinely want to improve their prospects, even
if at the moment they’re emotionally unqualified to do so. I hope the
experience pays off for them.
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