The unequivocally titled Adultery began with a somewhat portentous voiceover. ‘There is a psychological equation,’ it intoned. ‘Attraction plus an obstacle equals excitement. But what happens if the attraction is too strong and the obstacles are too great? Do you threaten everything?’ The answer to the latter question would turn out to be a firm ‘yes’ – but first, the show had to get the adulterers together: something it did with commendable efficiency.
Following one of those familiar scenes of everyday family chaos, harassed mum Beth set off on yet another errand for her teenage son Ollie and knocked a hunky bloke off his bike with her car. By coincidence, the hunky bloke in question was Ollie’s girlfriend’s father, Tom – a GP by trade – whom she’d somehow never met before.
After they’d established the link, and chortled inordinately over the possibility that they might one day become joint grandparents, Beth (Romola Garai) drove Tom (Dominic Cooper) to A&E, where the bantz continued and her solicitousness about his slightly injured wrist approached the obsessive. More significantly still, when he walked off to the X-ray department, glancing backwards all the while, he did so in slow-motion.
‘What was Ollie’s mum like? Is she attractive?’ Tom’s wife Hannah asked him when he got home. ‘Yeah – in that obvious kind of way,’ Tom replied (not a response I’d recommend to any husbands reading). Before long, he and Beth were sending each other texts, all of them received with a wistful smile and an anxious check as to whether a spouse was nearby.
The following Saturday Tom and Hannah held a party, which, a week before, Beth hadn’t fancied but now attended with some enthusiasm, together with a careful choice of outfit. Once there, she had a good snoop round the house, with particular reference to photos of Tom. In quieter moments, the two found time to exchange theatrically yearning looks.
But the party served two other important functions – both carried out with that same absence of ambiguity. The class division between the couples was established by means of Beth’s husband Neil rejecting cocktails in favour of beer and making jokes about Tom injuring his ‘wanking hand’. Meanwhile, Hannah handily proved to be a bit rubbish too, with her middle-class brittleness and lack of humour.
By this stage, most viewers will have been thinking ‘get a room’. In the event, though, Tom and Beth successively got his surgery, his car and the outbuilding of a petting zoo, pausing only to say that they must stop doing all this.
Perhaps aware that the main story is a little on the nose, the script throws in several subplots – the trouble being that these are on the nose as well. Annoyingly, the second of this week’s two episodes ended with a cracking cliffhanger, which means I’ll probably have to keep watching. Nonetheless, I suspect that what I’ll keep watching will continue to feel like TV drama by numbers.
It seems an iron rule of television criticism that you can’t review BBC1’s ratings hit This City Is Ours – now back for a second series – without using the phrase ‘The Scouse Sopranos’. Nor is it hard to see why. Not only does it centre on a gangster family, but there’s the same mix of the violence-and-drugs stuff with plenty of recognisable domesticity.
I suspect that what I’ll keep watching will continue to feel like TV drama by numbers
The new series picked up six days after the first had ended with the killing in Liverpool of the Colombian drug-dealer Ricardo: a killing that’s particularly bad news for lead character Michael (James Nelson-Joyce).
Like his Godfather namesake, Michael had hoped to leave criminality behind – in his case, so as to live it up in Spain with wife Diana. At this point, he didn’t even know Ricardo was dead; but he soon found out when Ricardo’s brother Felipe kidnapped him and Diana, holding her hostage in his isolated mansion while Michael was sent back to Liverpool to identify Ricardo’s killer. (Playing Felipe, incidentally, Alvaro Morte doesn’t appear to have got the Scouse-Sopranos memo, going instead for full-on Bond villain with his endlessly sinister wisecracks and endlessly sinister everything else.)
Unfortunately, the guilty man is Banksy, Michael’s best friend, as well as, in the face of tough competition, perhaps the Scousest Scouser on display. No wonder that after those carefree opening scenes Michael’s face soon resumed its default expression of extravagant world-weariness.
At times, This City maybe takes itself too seriously. What it can’t be faulted for, however, is failing to supply bucketloads of tension. In the two new episodes so far, we’ve already had any number of thrillingly unnerving moments, with the promise of lots more to come. Of course, the series isn’t anywhere near as brilliant as the non-Scouse Sopranos, but that only goes to show that you can fall well short of that benchmark and still be pretty great.
Comments