The thriller for pregnant women so scary Boots could sell it as birth control
HOPING to start a family? You might be having second thoughts today if you saw this new BBC maternity drama, so scary that Boots could sell the box-set as a contraceptive. The Replacement (BBC1) starred Morven Christie as Ellen, a young glasgow architect who enjoyed a stellar career. Before you could say ‘stretch marks’, cracks were appearing at Ellen’s workplace, in her relationships with her hubbie and her sister, and in her sanity.
This was much more than a conventional psycho- thriller, because for much of the episode we couldn’t be sure if the looming sense of dread was all in her mind. She was awash with hormones, plagued by paranoia.
Or perhaps it really was the case that everything she loved and had worked so hard to achieve was in jeopardy – from the woman her bosses hired to provide cover while Ellen was on maternity leave.
Vicky McClure (from Line Of Duty) was chillingly good as paula, Ellen’s stand- in, who seemed intent on taking over her whole life. Self-effacing and empathetic, paula was too saintly to be true, so eager to learn the ropes that she was in the office weeks before Ellen was due to leave.
Office staff adored paula and clients thought she was a star. Ellen felt that only she could see a different person, who was secretive, manipulative and concealing tensions in her own home life.
But while the mum-to-be fretted, her replacement was quietly collecting the credit for everything – even claiming to be the first to feel Ellen’s unborn baby kick.
Christie gave a superb performance as the neurotic over-achiever, so highly strung that she’d married her own therapist. This detail added to the impression that Christie’s character had a screw loose and that her perceptions of reality might be skewed.
Cleverly, she didn’t try to make us like Ellen. By the end of the hour, the first in a three-part series, she was openly conniving to get her rival sacked, and berating her husband Ian (Richard Rankin) for not sharing her obsession.
Mind you, Ian didn’t have a good explanation for why paula the stand-in knew his mobile number. Maybe Ellen’s problem was that she hadn’t been paranoid enough.
The Replacement couldn’t sustain that level of insidious ambiguity, however. In the final scene, the body of Ellen’s boss plunged through an open skylight wrapped in a polythene sheet. That wasn’t just a hormonal delusion. What comes next remains to be seen, and I suspect the murder will reduce a brilliant concept to a more conventional crime mystery. That would be a shame, because writer and director Joe Ahearne has devised a mind-twisting setup forcing the audience, like the central characters, to doubt everything they see. Most of all, The Replacement must be awkward viewing for any viewers who are planning a baby. When paula started making casual comments about how drastically motherhood had changed her, and how she was forced to put her career on hold for ten years, many young women must have thought: ‘Maybe I’ll just get a cat.’