Welcome to the very strange
Modern romance isn’t what it used to be but I can’t help being pulled in by a superb script and performances — it’s better than more gangsters, writes Aidan Smith
In the battle of the romcoms One Day lands the first blow by starting early and its target audience is already snuggled up with heart-shaped chocolates and swooning at the Netflix show before the rival Alice & Jack gets going. I know, it’s not really a battle. Romcoms aren’t predisposed to fighting, just like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant weren’t predisposed to that scrap in Bridget Jones’s Diary, apologising profusely to all the diners whose tables they smashed. It is possible to like One Day and Alice & Jack and many will have room in their hearts for both. But the Channel 4 drama, which waited until Valentine’s Day as a demonstration of its cool, is superior. And I will fight you over this.
“Love is the best thing we have, and maybe after stripping away all the bull **** it’s the only thing we have.” These are the opening words, spoken by Jack (Domhnall Gleeson), a biomedical researcher, who hooks up with Alice (Andrea Riseborough) via an app. She questions his job, how there will always be another auto-immune disease to investigate, and that as work it must have a “hazy reward calculus”. So what does she do? “I make money,” she says bluntly.
The date appears to be going nowhere but, wait, she calls him a “crusader” and “adorable” and, back at her place the following morning, “kind, handsome and a good lover”. So why’s she kicking him out? What a shame. Their first snog was lovely.
Told not to try getting back in touch, he spots her the following night, taking another guy home. He pines, clings to what he perceived as the “sub-text” of her kiss-off. “Sub-texts can get you killed,” warns a friend, but they meet again only to part again. Something’s gnawing at her but she continues to obsess him, despite the relationship’s hazy reward calculus. Ratio of time spent with her to time spent brokenhearted? “One to 60,000.”
Victor Levin’s script is sharply truthful - here’s how the modern “situationship” works, or doesn’t - and the performances in this six-parter are superb. I’ve always loved Riseborough and, honestly and objectively, this has nothing at all to do with how smart, funny and - yes - flirty she was when I interviewed her back in 2008. Okay, maybe a little it has. She’s the only actress to have ever given me her phone number. (I was to call later in the hope she’d secured a ticket for me to see her woo Kenneth Branagh on stage, the second seduction of that day).
Time passes, Jack meets Lynn (Aisling Bea) who becomes pregnant right away and they marry. Then from nowhere Alice re-appears. Her mum’s just died and Jack accompanies her to the funeral. Gleeson and Riseborough captivate in each tiny gesture; just the way Alice glances admiringly at Jack while he’s comforting her father is profound. But we’re starting to understand some idea of what’s troubling her.
Then Lynn confronts Jack: “What percentage of the days since you conned me into marriage have you thought of her?” The answer comes straight back: “One hundred percent.” These two divorce, our star-crossed lovers reunite, but sat on a hill at a kite festival, Alice suddenly takes flight once more. Oh no!
Now, a wee tip: maybe don’t go straight from Alice & Jack to the return of BBC1’S Kin. The violence could be too much, the schlockiness, too.
The second series opens with a supermarket shooting which leaves the only witness whose testimony could keep that right bad yin Eric Kinsella in jail with more holes in him than in all the Spaghetti Hoops on the nearby shelves.
Of course all of the Kinsellas in the Dublin-based crime clan are right bad yins. Aidan Gillen as Frank, guilt-ridden enough to slope into church, is the bestknown here although coming up fast