Romance is dead in this joyless slog of a love story
Aman and a woman spend the best part of two decades in love but not getting together. That’s the plot of One Day, a lively romance currently breaking hearts on Netflix. Unfortunately, it’s also the plot of Alice
& Jack (Channel 4), a joyless slog that is being released on Valentine’s Day in what feels like an arthouse joke.
Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson play the leads. She’s a City high-flyer, he’s a shy biomedical researcher. They meet on an internet date, which you will observe and think, “Jack, run for your life.” Alice is scarily intense. Even her lipstick is terrifying. They spend the night together, and he wakes in the morning to find her looming over him with an expression that suggests she’s about to remove his organs with a carving knife.
What follows is six episodes of Alice rejecting Jack, announcing that she’s marrying someone else, disappearing for years at a time, then popping up in his life at inconvenient moments, expecting him to drop everything. It seems that the drama’s creator, Victor Levin, wants us to find her endearing. Perhaps the problem is that he’s American (he was a producer of Mad Men) and doesn’t realise that British viewers will simply think Alice is a narcissistic nutjob.
And Jack is such a sap that mostly he does drop everything when Alice reappears. Pity the other woman in his life, played by Aisling Bea. If the story was reversed and it was a man behaving as Alice does, he’d be called all the names in the Mumsnet dictionary. We get a bit of backstory early on about her having a terrible childhood, but that doesn’t excuse or explain everything.
Things get increasingly random. I won’t give away too many spoilers, but there is a plotline about artificial insemination that involves an etymologist from Watford, and an episode in which Alice bangs on about oil futures and yells: “Sell, sell, sell!” like the Duke brothers in Trading Places.
It manages to be preposterous and deathly at the same time. The dialogue is pretentious. The last five minutes are completely stupid. The only bright spots are the two supporting performances, from Aimee Lou Wood as Maya, Alice’s capable assistant, and Sunil Patel as Paul, Jack’s colleague. Paul is always on hand to offer deadpan assessments of the situation. He calls the relationship “a catastrophe”, which is a) correct, and b) a reminder of Catastrophe, the brilliant Channel 4 show about a couple navigating life’s ups and downs. Watch that instead.
Bring the Drama (BBC Two) is such a bad idea that it shouldn’t have made it past the first email. An email that presumably read: “Shall we do The X Factor but, like, for acting?”
It’s a TV talent show, presented by Bill Bailey, in which aspiring actors with no professional experience compete for the chance to be represented by an agent. Some are young, working as baristas or cab drivers while trying to land auditions. At the older end of the scale is George, 61, a retired policeman who always had a secret hankering to be on screen.
The BBC says that this is about finding undiscovered talent and giving opportunities to people who are struggling to get a foothold in the industry due to a lack of privilege (no rich mummy and daddy to fund them through drama school). Gosh, if only the BBC knew of a TV company – a British broadcasting corporation, say – that could address this when casting for the myriad dramas and comedies it puts out every year. Instead, it will give this opportunity to precisely one person at the end of a six-week reality show.
Auditioning for a stony-faced casting director must be intimidating enough, but with a camera crew in the room and a TV audience watching at home? It’s mortifying. And even this country’s greatest thespians didn’t suffer the indignity of being filmed as they took part in acting workshops.
Each week, they must recreate an “iconic” TV scene, which here meant an Eastenders scene in which Sonia performed emergency surgery on Phil Mitchell’s son in the Queen Vic using a kitchen knife and a Biro. This led to the surreal sight of Sonia being played by a 67-year-old healthcare assistant, and Phil by someone in their 20s.
The eight contestants are at least getting national exposure, and good luck to all of them. Their performances were genuinely of no lesser standard than half of the people currently appearing in British soaps.
The show has some merit: if you want to become an actor, there are practical tips here. But that could have been achieved via a documentary, or a BBC outreach initiative, or something else that isn’t a TV talent show.
Alice & Jack ★★ Bring the Drama ★★