Marian Keyes’ Watermelon

TV3 Player, until April 21 Charming, funny adaptation of Marian Keyes’s first novel, with Anna Friel (left) as Claire, a young Dublin girl living in London who gets unexpectedly pregnant — and only finds out when she is happily in a relationship with another man, Adam. When she goes into labour ‘early’, only to deliver a full-term baby, Adam twigs, and leaves. Claire, brokenhearted, unable to cope, goes home to her mother, (a magnificent Brenda Fricker), bewildered father (Sean McGinley), and demanding younger sister Anna (Elaine Cassidy), and begins to gradually pick up the pieces of her life. Slowly, she discovers that what looks like a disaster can often be anything but.

Neither Keyes nor Kieron J Walsh, who directed this, is reinventing the wheel here, but the film is light, well-acted and engaging enough to stand repeat viewings. Come Home RTE Player, until April 26, episode 1 Written by Danny Brocklehurst (Shameless, Ordinary Lies), with Christopher Eccleston and Paula Malcomson, Come Home is a thoroughly gripping new TV drama. A three-parter, the first episode gives us Greg (Eccleston in uncharacteristically low-key form, and excellent for it) as a man whose wife has walked out on him and their three children, seemingly without reason or explanation, after 19 years of marriage. Eleven months after her departure, he is trying to date again, trying to care for his kids and hold down his job as a car mechanic, all the while, apparently, trying to understand why his wife has left.

And then, just when we’re feeling properly sorry for him, we meet Marie, his wife, at what seems to be their final mediation session, and suddenly nothing is clear-cut any more.

So far, this looks like the kind of psychological drama that offers a sharp, even disturbing perspective on just how differently two people can view the same relationship, but of course, it could turn out to be something quite different.