Awkward, deliciously frank dating comedy hits the spot
Is the bisexual a mythical creature, like the unicorn or Nessie or the blast-ended skrewt? LGBQT+ politics being an area of discourse so scarily landmined, it’s quite a bold thought bubble to put out there, even in a comedy. On the evidence of (C4), the exploration of the answer will be a lot of fun, if certainly not for all the family.
Its director and star is Desiree Akhavan, the resourceful Iranianamerican who keeps asking the question. She has just followed up her 2014 semi-autobiographical debut film Appropriate Behaviour with the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which told of a bi-curious girl sent for gay conversion therapy. The Bisexual approaches the same no-man’s-land from a different direction.
Its protagonist is Leila (Akhavan), who’s a bit of a whiny and selfdestructive narcissist. After suspending her 10-year relationship with Sadie (Maxine Peake), she wonders if it’s possible for a lesbian to train herself to switch horses and plump for men. Her first attempt, craftily written and deftly played, was an excruciating humiliation as her selected quarry was simply too baffled to participate.
The Bisexual has the brash verve of Lip Service, BBC Three’s groundbreaking saga about a nexus of gay women. Akhavan and her co-writer Cecilia Frugiuele also tug it towards the territory of awkward and deliciously frank dating comedies such as Pulling and Fleabag. It’s not clear how many punchlines Maxine Peake will be handed, but the rest are distributed even-handedly among a gallery of vulnerable but also faintly awful people: Gabe, an Irish novelist of dwindling renown (Brian Gleeson), his on-off French girlfriend Francisca (Michèlle Guillot) who witheringly tells him she thought he’d be more avant garde in bed; and Leila’s pugnacious best mate Deniz (Saskia Chana).
The equal-opportunity script is not afraid to call out the idiocies of other groupings: straight women who go in for lesbian tourism, straight men whose lesbian fantasies crumple on impact with a living breathing representative. It’s witty and pleasingly literate, with savvy jokes about Zadie Smith, Alain de Botton and, crushingly, Salman Rushdie. The trailblazing Noughties lesbian drama The L Word is obligatorily name-dropped. But The Bisexual’s secret weapon is its willingness to be moving. You laugh like a drain, but you care.
In 1976, Fred Handford disappeared from his farm in Derbyshire. No body was ever found and the case remained a puzzler for the police until Janet Holt stepped forward, 35 years later, to say that she had twice been raped by Handford and, fearing he was about to do it again, shot him, buried him in a field and promptly forgot all about it until 2010 when a short course of psychotherapy disinterred her memories. Or so she says.
Since that day she has made prolonged but fruitless efforts to prove that she is guilty of murder.
Am I a Murderer? (ITV) was the latest instalment in that campaign and, unless it succeeds in flushing out a previously untapped witness, is not going to land her behind bars.
With apologies for the lapse in taste, I was faintly reminded of Fletch and Godber trying to break back into prison in the film version of Porridge. This could and should have been a deeply serious contribution to the #Metoo story. Before us, apparently, was a woman who was so desperate to speak of a historical rape that she was prepared to sacrifice her freedom.
But the programme failed to position her ordeal as a parable about sexual violence. There was a weird lack of curiosity about her motives for coming forward – all anyone got out of her was that she wanted to set the record straight, while the police risibly alleged that she was a fantasist who cooked up the story as a sort of meta-denouement to help flog her self-published memoir.
Janet could certainly be seen as an unreliable narrator of her own continuing trauma. But the same went for Handford’s daughter Lynette Chapman, who deplored the very idea that her father could have been guilty of rape, only to reveal after the break that he was a terrifying domestic bully.
The whole repetitive concoction amounted to gossipy tabloid TV. There was the usual parade of experts, the county shrink and the nodding bobby. All of them talked up the story into something it wasn’t while ignoring what it actually was.
The Bisexual Am I a Murderer?