Ad-libbed Car Share was hilarious – and touching
What a lovely amuse-bouche this was as we eagerly await the main course – the very last episode of the Bafta award-winning Car Share, which is broadcast later this month. The will-they-won’t-they story of car-sharing colleagues John (Peter Kay) and Kayleigh (Sian Gibson) has played out over two series, and Kay has said it’s definitely coming to an end. For disappointed fans, however, he released this delicious ad-libbed treat, he said in an introduction: “We decided to try something special. What would it be like if we filmed a whole journey without a script, just making it up and basically seeing what happened?” And so, in Peter Kay’s Car Share
Unscripted (BBC One), John and Kayleigh sat in his beloved red Fiat 500, singing, gossiping and teasing each other as they rode home from work, with the fictional Forever FM – with its playlist of Eighties hits, cheesy presenters and rubbish advertisements – on the radio.
As John and Kayleigh lustily sang along to the Fine Young Cannibals’ version of Buzzcocks classic Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve), she suddenly piped up: “I can do Heather Small” – breaking into One Night…, which sounded exactly the same as her Roland Gift. Kay rejoined with: “That is Miss Piggy!” before nearly losing it.
It could have been horribly indulgent (and corpsing was never far away) but this was no out-takes reel in the making. Kay and Gibson stayed in character throughout and have an obvious rapport that threw up some superb comedy.
Kayleigh, one slice short of a loaf herself, mused at length about the constituents of a club sandwich. “What does the ‘u’ stand for?” she asked a mystified John. “I mean, in a BLT there’s bacon, lettuce and tomato, and in a club sandwich there’s chicken, lettuce and bacon. What’s the ‘u’?”
Food played a large part in the episode, as they also discussed what they might have for their tea that evening. “Chicken Kiev with a fried egg,” said John, causing Kayleigh to shriek that he couldn’t have chicken
and an egg on the same plate – “Why not? It’s the same family.”
Written down, this may sound mundane, but Kay and Gibson have created an entirely believable universe for their characters, making the everyday interaction between sweet, innocent Kayleigh and curmudgeonly but kind John raucously funny and heartbreakingly tender by turns.
Our appetites are suitably whetted for the finale. Veronica Lee
If the greatness of a work can be judged by the number of adaptations, then Wilkie Collins’s enduring psychodrama The Woman in White (BBC One) is near the top of the pantheon. Each version has had something to recommend in it – even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ill-fated musical had its moments – and this interpretation by Fiona Seres has shown admirable fidelity to the original while teasing out contemporary themes.
These came to a head in the finale, as Laura (Olivia Vinall) and Marian (Jessie Buckley), for so long the victims of gaslighting, coercive relationships, physical and psychological abuse, struck back. Sir Percival (Dougray Scott) met a fiery fate while attempting to destroy evidence of his illegitimacy, while Fosco’s (Riccardo Scamarcio) past betrayals caught up with him and he was bumped off by Walter’s old friend Pesca (Ivan Kaye) for betraying a nationalist brotherhood. The two climaxes, each brilliantly handled, with Art Malik’s wounded yet dignified Erasmus Nash on hand to ensure fair play where possible and clarity in the labyrinthine narrative. Nash was a Seres invention, but worked handsomely as a canny tool to negotiate the slabs of exposition while maintaining pace and tension.
The casting, too, was startlingly good, as actors of the calibre of Kerry Fox, Ruth Sheen and Joanna Scanlan made do with walk-on parts while the leads feasted on Collins’s prose. Charles Dance reined in his natural stentorianism for a joyously quavering Frederick Fairlie; Scott has become a character actor of genuine breadth; Vinall and Ben Hardy found added dimensions to the potentially pallid Laura and Walter. Most impressive of all was Buckley. Already the best thing about both Taboo and War & Peace, and currently starring in the acclaimed film Beast, she portrayed Marian as both forthright and ambiguous.
For the full-on Gothic atmosphere, this was perhaps the best since the 2006 Jane Eyre that gave Ruth Wilson her big break. While it’s dangerous to call any adaptation definitive, this one came very close. Gabriel Tate
Peter Kay’s Car Share Unscripted ★★★★
The Woman in White ★★★★