Designer furniture and a fascinating power dynamic
Last night on television Anita Singh
Drama often rests on a character doing something so improbable that you sit at home yelling: “Are you mad? Don’t do it!” In The (BBC One), Dan Docherty has this voice in his head but does the stupid thing anyway. He is a successful businessman with designer furniture and a vast living space in which to drink white wine while looking out of picture windows. His wife, Emily, has been through gruelling IVF treatment and a string of miscarriages and is desperate to find a surrogate mother to carry their last viable embryo.
Dan (Martin Compston, much more comfortable doing his native Scottish accent than being a Line of Duty Londoner) has made it from a tough Glasgow background and is savvy enough to know that a volatile 18-year-old fresh out of care is not the best surrogacy candidate. Everything about this girl, Kaya, rang alarm bells for him and for us. When we first saw her, she was brawling in the street with her social worker, who later gave her a toaster and kettle for her new flat which she promptly threw off the top of the tower block.
Emily (Sophie Rundle) accidentally bumped into Kaya – literally – in her 4x4 and within days the teenager had offered to carry her baby. Dan was deeply suspicious of her motives, pointing out that she is probably unstable and could easily refuse to hand over the baby at the end of it – all the things that viewers at home were thinking. And yet by episode’s close he’d agreed to it all, because how could we get a six-part series otherwise?
It’s an intriguing set-up though, and this is one of those dramas that could go either way – drawing us in with clever plotting or spiralling into ridiculousness. The fact that the writer is Nicole Taylor, who gave us the brilliant and Bafta-winning Three Girls, is cause for optimism. The acting is faultless, with Mirren Mack giving an edgy performance as Kaya (although those two bits of hair hanging down her face drove me to distraction). And the power dynamic in surrogacy cases is a fascinating subject to explore: the middle-class couple with the money to change a disadvantaged girl’s life, but that girl holds all the cards until she signs over parental rights.
The director appears to be a little too in love with Dan and Emily’s house, at one point conveying their devastation at losing a baby by framing them, in evening dress, against those lovely windows. Let’s hope the drama lives up to the view.
There are few things in TV so delicious as a face-off between two warring women. Who can forget Dynasty’s Alexis and Krystle Carrington having a fight in the lily pond? Julian Fellowes is aware of this, and the second episode of Belgravia
(ITV) moved up a few gears when Lady Brockenhurst and Anne Trenchard had a drawing room showdown.
Anne (Tamsin Greig) was dropping the bombshell that they shared a secret grandson, the product of Anne’s daughter, Sophia, and Lady Brockenhurst’s son, Edmund, now both dearly departed. Edmund had tricked Sophia into a bogus marriage in order to have his wicked way with her. That did not go down well with Lady B, wonderfully played by Dame Harriet Walter: “Your daughter was scheming to catch my wretched son, no doubt encouraged by her parents. He was a man and she was a slut. It happens.” Gosh. And Anne hit back with… well, nothing. There is dignified, and then there is being a wet blanket. But Anne is meant to be the moral centre of this story, the one with heart and reserves of strength.
She certainly needs the latter, after discovering that her husband has spent years in a secret business arrangement with the secret grandson. There are quite a few secrets going on in this series. Anne also has astonishingly good genes, because how else to explain the fact she looks the same as she did 26 years ago?
New characters included the grandson, Charles Pope (Jack Bardoe), a modest young man hoping to make his way in the world and unaware of his parentage. There is a classy cast of veterans, including Tom Wilkinson as the Earl of Brockenhurst. The scene in which Wilkinson and Walter shared their grief over losing a child was exquisite. James Fleet is a welcome addition as the Earl’s brother, whose son, John (Adam James), is described as a “pompous ass”, which is usually the marker of an enjoyable character.
The mistake of the series is to include the downstairs staff. They are unlikeable and, presumably, included as a sop to Downton fans. All they do is give you a pang of longing for Carson.