Mad women, sly men, a fab kitchen ...this is psycho-drama by numbers
RULE One of a good domestic psychodrama is: men, they’re all the same, you can’t trust them. Rule Two: however superficially sane they might seem, all women are mad.
Rule Three, and most important of all: every troubled family has a fabulous kitchen.
Lee Ingleby is Nick, the sleazy male in Cuckoo (Ch5). He’s neckdeep in debt, unable to pay the repair bills for the family’s tumbledown farmhouse that is gradually being consumed by ivy, like the palace in Sleeping Beauty.
He’s even pawning his wife’s jewellery to make ends meet, but daren’t tell her, because he’s in enough trouble already for having an office affair that also cost him his job. Men, eh?
At least he’s not crazed with mid-life hormones like the loony lodger, Sian (Jill Halfpenny). She turns up with an envelope full of £20 notes, intent on renting a room, and immediately sets about taking charge.
Within a day, she’s cooking a full English breakfast for four on the range, and loading the washing machine. You might think she’s succumbed to the temptation of that huge rustic kitchen, but there’s a deeper scheme sizzling away with the bacon and eggs — she’s going to steal her hosts’ teenage daughter, Alice (Freya Hannan-Mills).
Alice is still at school, but that’s old enough to be bonkers. She rows constantly with her mum Jessica (Claire Goose), spends long evenings drawing zombies with empty eye sockets, and reacts to bad news by stealing her dad’s car and deliberately crashing it into a ditch.
Anyone who wants to abduct a teenager, let alone one as troubled as this, must be certifiable. But Sian possesses deranged cunning that, if she had a bit more ambition, could serve her well as an international criminal.
Simply by watching Nick’s reflection in a mirror, through a keyhole, she is able to decipher the code to his safe. Timing her burglary to the second, while Jessica is in the shower, Sian cracks the safe and discovers the document she’s looking for — Alice’s birth certificate.
Ingleby is great at petulant characters, frustrated with their own weakness. It’s easy to believe he’d be suspicious of Sian on sight but unable to turf her out of his own house. By the end of the episode, Alice was sitting stunned while the lodger tearfully claimed to be her birth mother. Halfpenny, a veteran of EastEnders, was selling it with conviction — she’s played many soap scenes stranger than this.
But it follows hard on Kate Winslet’s turn in The Regime on Sky Atlantic, as a woman capable of governing an entire country but also in the throes of an acrimonious divorce from reality.
These psychological stereotypes never get explained. All we need to know is — she’s a woman, of course she’s insane. He’s a man, naturally he’s a duplicitous weasel. Just once, I’d like to see a drama where the wife is emotionally stable but casually dishonest, and the husband is bursting into tears while comfort-eating an entire packet of Jammy Dodgers. It would make a change.