PICK OF THE WEEK

Years and Years

SoHo, 8:30pm Monday Never mind where you see yourself in five years’ time — where do you see the world?

That’s the big question pondered by the BBC and HBO’s dystopian family drama Years and Years. It begins in 2019, where multiple strands of the middle-class Lyons family are watching an outspoken entrepreneur make a trending topic of herself on the BBC’s popular political panel show Question Time.

Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson) is like an unsubtle and all too imaginable cross between tabloid columnist Katie Hopkins and actual US President Donald Trump. “I suppose,” she responds to one question from the audience, “when it comes to Israel and Palestine . . . I don’t give a f***.”

Her populist rant (“all I want is for my bins to be collected once a week!”) is predictably polarising. Responses within the family range from “ya can’t say thaaat” to “I’d vote for her". We’ve all seen enough real life to see where this is headed.

Days later, the birth of a new baby into the Lyons family (just quietly: this might be the biggest "newborn baby" ever seen on TV) sends an uncle off on an existential rant: “If [the state of the world is] this bad now,” he wonders, “what’s it going to be like for you?”

Here’s where the show really kicks off. The next five years are predicted in a crystal ball-gazing montage of family birthdays and weddings, interspersed with snatches of news reports: a second term for Trump in 2020, the death of the Queen, Viv Rook standing for Parliament. Trouble in the Ukraine leads to an unprecedented influx of refugees to the UK, while tensions escalate between the US and China.

The 2024 we arrive in is like a slightly more well-thought-out Black Mirror.

But the first episode’s climax — at once unsurprising yet still heart-racing — elevates Years and Years to another level altogether.