A fine finish to this most heartwarming of dramas
Farewell lovely The Durrells (ITV), we will miss you. It is always such a wrench when a much-loved, harmless piece of sun-splashed whimsy runs out of steam and gets ruthlessly wiped from the schedules. Still, The Durrells got a good send-off, with its writer Simon Nye penning an episode that gave the majority of the characters one last walk-on part (even muscly Swedish accordion player Sven; I mean, when did we last see him?).
The swansong opened with a large dollop of what we love so much about the series: sharp sunlight, azure sky, the crumbling old villa at the blue water’s edge and the happy shrieks of family reunion as Larry (Josh O’connor) returned from his travels and dived headlong into the shimmering embrace of the Ionian Sea. What bliss.
Unfortunately, the year was 1939 and Larry had brought bad news with him. “Just to update you, Europe is on the brink of war,” he said – a line that, in another series, might be sneered at for its lack of subtlety, yet here it’s how they talk to each other all the time. Yes, the dark clouds gathering over the rest of Europe had finally drifted far enough south to blot out the sun from their little idyll in Corfu. Italy had invaded Albania, just a few miles
across that innocent-looking sea.
It wasn’t long before materfamilias Louisa (Keeley Hawes) had even worse tidings: in her trembling hand a telegram informing them that unlucky Milo (Miles Jupp) had been shot and killed on his way back to Blighty. “Just for being English,” Louisa gasped, making quite an assumption given how irritatingly bumptious
Milo could be.
There was only one thing for it: to turn their backs on paradise and return, for safety’s sake, to the cold clasp of England. But not before putting on a play – obviously. What else would English people do other than culturally appropriate Homer’s Odyssey in tribute to their Greek hosts and neighbours?
Naturally the heart-fluttering climax of Louisa’s love affair with Spiros (Alexis Georgoulis) had to be negotiated first. That romantic run along a beach, the passionate clinch and declaration of such mutually selfless nobility as hasn’t been seen since Brief Encounter will doubtless have seen many a hankie wrung out. It was a fine – one might even say proper – way to finish off this most heartwarming of dramas. Only Larry was left lingering in Corfu, an unlikely spy. Who knows, perhaps they’re planning a less whimsical wartime spin-off.
The harsher realities of family life, for some, was the subject of Louis Theroux: Mothers on the Edge (BBC Two), in which the documentary-maker turned his lens on women dealing with mental illness brought on by childbirth. The opening sequence, of a new mother needing to be encouraged to touch her own baby, set the film’s tone.
“For all its joys, new motherhood can be a time of extreme psychiatric difficulty,” said Theroux. And a time of extraordinary emotional complexity, as in the case of Catherine, whose articulate, calm exterior belied that she was on 24-hour one-to-one monitoring following a recent suicide attempt. Her story, of a previous baby stillborn, of grief and guilt balefully combined, of fear and despondency and unattainable expectations had a quietly raw intensity to it, as did the shocking news of a further suicide attempt later in the film.
Another new mother, Barbara, was in the grip of post-partum psychosis, her delusional beliefs about her baby, her husband and her in-laws strikingly illustrative of how detached from reality a mind in crisis can be. At the other end of the treatment cycle, Lisa, a mother of three admitted to the unit after a series of psychotic episodes, spoke of her understandable anxiety about leaving the unit and returning to motherhood unsupported.
Inevitably the emotional and psychological issues playing out here went far deeper than any hour-long documentary could untangle. And if it seemed odd, at the outset, for Theroux to be steering a course through such complex maternal waters, he proved a sensitive, sympathetic and perceptive guide. His well-honed ability to put interviewees at ease and draw them out with blunt but emotionally on-themark enquiries elicited responses of extraordinary honesty in a film that, though painful to watch, was a brilliant evocation of what can go wrong when motherhood doesn’t prove as natural a role as society would have us expect, and how feelings familiar to all parents can, in some cases, tip over into an acute mental health crisis.
The Durrells ★★★★
Louis Theroux: Mothers on the Edge ★★★★