Humour, hope and joy in the bleakest of situations
In a way, I don’t feel qualified to review There She Goes. It is about parents, played by Jessica Hynes and David Tennant, raising a child who is severely learning disabled. I know what it is to be a parent, but not to be a parent in these circumstances. But the show is written by Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford, and based on their own experiences with their daughter, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder, so we can be sure it’s truthful.
The first series was hidden away on BBC Four, a sign that commissioners weren’t entirely confident about it. Now it is on BBC Two, which feels right. There She Goes is billed as a comedy drama, but that description doesn’t seem to capture it entirely. There are jokes, mostly from father Simon (Tennant). At school sports day, he drily dismisses the need for his daughter to take part in the 20m race: “I don’t think it’s that important. I hear last year, six kids all tied for last.”
But Simon often uses black humour as a defence mechanism and to hide his emotions, particularly in the early days and particularly in front of his wife, Emily (Hynes). The narrative flits between different time periods, from daughter Rosie’s first years and then to the present, with Rosie aged 11. It has been done this way to mark the contrast between then and now. Then, there was an aching sadness as Simon and Emily sat together in the car, after being told the extent of Rosie’s disabilities: “She’s not going to magically improve. There’s no miracle cure, no misdiagnosis. I’m never going to sit with her while she opens her GCSES and you’re never going to walk her down the aisle.”
Simon considered leaving, unable to cope with the responsibility. If this is Pye’s story, then he is being admirably honest. It is Emily who is left to do the emotional heavy-lifting, not just with Rosie but with their son, Ben. Hynes’s performance in one of the closing scenes, as Ben asked if his sister would ever be normal, was beautiful.
In the present, though, when Rosie’s condition is a part of everyday life, it gets closer to a standard sitcom. The tone can be uneven – but then, isn’t parenting like that? In its gentleness, it reminded me of Channel 4’s refugee comedy, Home – another series that takes what could be a bleak subject and tempers it with humour, hope and little moments of joy.
Do you remember Raoul Moat? Ten years ago, he shot and injured his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, murdered her new partner, Christopher Brown, and blinded a traffic officer, PC David Rathband, by shooting him in the face. During his eight days on the run, he taunted police and warned that he would kill more of them. The case dominated the news.
So there was nothing intrinsically wrong with ITV commissioning Manhunt: The Raoul Moat Story, letting the detectives recount those events and take us to the heart of the police operation. True crime documentaries are always popular and this one had dramatic tension as the days ticked by with Moat still in hiding, ending up with a fatal stand-off in the market town of Rothbury.
However, there was a tone-deafness about the project. Because here was a police officer lamenting: “We focused on Raoul Moat, we focused on the manhunt, but it seemed to me we forgot about the most important people here: the victims,” in a documentary called Manhunt: The Raoul Moat Story, and one which gave almost no time to the stories of either Stobbart or PC Rathband. A postscript simply informed us at the end that Stobbart had recovered from her injuries and rebuilt her life, and that PC Rathband died by suicide 18 months after the shooting.
Perhaps the families of both declined to be involved. The programme did make space for the family of Brown. Tragically, he was murdered because Moat wrongly believed him to be a police officer. He had moved from his home town of Slough to Tyneside after a friend told him it was a fun place to work in. His mother and sister were on their way to a birthday party when the police arrived. “That’s when the ground opened up,” his mother said.
But there was no need for us to hear Stobbart’s screaming 999 call, or for presenter Nicky Campbell’s hammy script: “For years he believed they were out to get him… now he was out to get them.” At least it didn’t dwell too long on Paul Gascoigne’s appearance with a bucket of fried chicken and some fishing rods, although that bizarre sideshow may be remembered long after the names of the victims have slipped from public memory.
There She Goes ★★★★
Manhunt: The Raoul Moat Story ★★