Coleman shines in intense study of early motherhood
The onslaught from BBC Drama continues with (BBC One). This intense study of early motherhood is a far cry from Bodyguard, its Sunday prime-time predecessor, but it did have one striking resemblance to another current drama. Like Press, it opened with a young woman steeling herself to face an intense examination from a waiting phalanx of news cameras.
Perhaps this should count as a hackneyed device, but it sure gets your attention. In The Cry the woman undergoing trial by media was Joanna (Jenna Coleman), a young mother whose tiny baby was snatched from a car while they were on holiday in Australia. Quite what she’s accused of is not clear yet, but so far we know she feels conflicted about what ought to be a mother’s worst nightmare.
The first episode spent much agonising time exploring the taboo idea that it’s not all golden smiles and Instagram heart emojis for mothers of newborn babies such as her Noah. Whether the rest of the drama, adapted by Jacquelin Perske from the 2013 crime novel by Helen Fitzgerald, quite matches up to the intensity of this provocative proposition is moot.
The plot is a complex lattice of present trauma and flashbacks to happier times. Joanna’s partner is bearded Aussie Alistair (Ewen Leslie) who, as well as being a bit of a pillock, is a dramatic irony in human form. They are in Australia because he is seeking to retrieve the child of a previous relationship just as he goes and loses the child of his current one. Also, he works in image management, and image management is exactly what Joanna looks like she’s going to need as she falls prey to public scrutiny.
Quite a lot of this feels overwrought and schematic, but there’s no denying the potency of the central proposition. Coleman is equally convincing as a cold and wounded victim and as a failing mother who has one memorable outburst on the long flight to Australia aimed at the smug, tutting fellow travellers. It’s not often this gets said, but the rawest performance comes from the baby (or babies) playing the poor afflicted Noah.
Richard Macer makes documentaries that ask subtly sharp questions. His portraits of Vogue, and an Oxfordshire village taking on the planning officers, were both keen examples of modern anthropology. For Farther and Sun: A
Dyslexic Road Trip (BBC Four, Sunday), the good story was inside his own home: the quest to explore the dyslexia his son Arthur may have inherited from him.
Arthur, in his last year of primary school and struggling with spelling, was very obviously unusual. It was not just his girlishly long hair (unlike the short crop of his stoical younger brother Harry). Nor his ingenuous ability to talk unfazed to celebs and scientists. What was truly striking was his gift for imagery. He visualised the business of learning as a porcupine hide that hurt to the touch, and spoke of dyslexia as a rash. He proved a persuasive case as Macer investigated the growing school of thought that dyslexia confers alternative and compensatory gifts – even superpowers, in the word of one expert.
Those arguing that poor spelling is no block on creative progress can cite Picasso, Einstein, Disney and Richard Rodgers (and, though he wasn’t mentioned, AA Gill). Macer’s own schooling was blighted by an earlier era’s failure to understand dyslexia. It was genuinely touching to see him disinter a memory of being bunged into the so-called odds and sods race at his school’s sports day.
If the film lacked one element, it was the honest admission that not all dyslexics find a way to break free and express their abilities like Eddie Izzard, with whom Arthur had a brief and encouraging encounter, or Dr Helen Taylor, the Cambridge academic who persuasively argued that dyslexics have an evolutionary function in society to be exploratory and adaptable. She was the only female dyslexic featured in a story of fathers handing the problem on to firstborn sons.
This was an eye-opening and engaging tour of a subject little-visited by television. It ended on a beautiful uptick as Arthur launched into another galloping metaphor in which he conceived of himself as a seed waiting to flower. It would be fascinating to watch a sequel in 20 years to see how he blossoms.
The Cry ★★★
Farther and Sun: A Dyslexic Road Trip ★★★★