Will the love rat find the first cut is the deepest one?
WHEN the opening s c ene of a five-part drama shows a married couple in a spontaneous act of love-making, it can only be a matter of time before it all ends in tears. Especially given that they’re at it on a mid-week morning before the school run.
At the age of 37, Gemma Foster (Suranne Jones) appears to have it all. She is the senior partner in a thriving GP practice and is such a pillar of the local community that she is a serving school governor.
Not surprisingly, Gemma also has all the trappings of success. She lives in a beautiful home with an expensively appointed kitchen that looks to be roughly the same size as a football pitch. Best of all, of course, she has an impeccably mannered son and an apparently adoring husband.
Shortly after that spot of diurnal congress, Gemma is shown cheeri l y making arrangements f or hubby Simon’s (Bertie Carvel) upcoming 40th birthday party.
To push home the point that life really couldn’t be much better, we even see her beeping the horn and waving from her car window at what are presumably adoring locals as she drives up the high street
So it is clear that Gemma really does have it all. As does, one can only assume, property developer Simon. The only problem is, however, that doesn’t appear to be enough for him.
The first hint of something being amiss came just after the opening sex scene. As the pair hurriedly get dressed for the day ahead, a lip balm falls to the floor from Simon’s trousers. It is, Gemma jokingly remarks, a bit ‘girly’ after her husband insists he bought it for himself.
When she finds a long blonde hair on her husband’s scarf later that same day, however, she begins to get suspicious. Which, given that Gemma herself has shortish dark hair, i s probably to be expected.
Soon, she is seeing blondes – and potential suspects – everywhere. And yet given that Simon appears to be the perfect husband and the evidence is only circumstantial, even she acknowledges that she is probably being paranoid. ‘ I’m sorry, I’m fine. Crisis over,’ she tells a colleague who has just tried to quell her fears. But still...
So next thing we know she is tailing Simon as he leaves work early and pops into a florist’s to buy a bouquet. It all appears to be innocent enough when it turns out that he is visiting his elderly mother in a nursing home, but that doesn’t entirely add up either.
Though he insists that he has been repeatedly getting in late because of stopping off to see his mum, his signature is noticeably absent from the home’s visitors’ book.
Needless to say, this discovery prompts Gemma to variously start snooping around her husband’s workplace after hours and to get up in the middle of the night to Google the phrase ‘cheating husband’. It is only when she
enlists one of her patients to follow Simon that it is confirmed that he is indeed playing away from home. Except it is even worse than that.
Because he isn’t having an affair with the gamey-looking but slightly matronly restaurant owner who was the main suspect, he is having an affair with her far more desirable daughter.
And worse than that again, a quick scan through the photos on Simon’s second mobile phone reveals that practically everybody Gemma knows is in on the secret.
Credit where it is due, this first episode was tightly plotted, nicely written and perfectly paced. I have no idea what’s going to unfold over the next four instalments, but I suspect it won’t be pretty.
Unless I’m mistaken, the way Gemma stretched out that long strand of blonde hair between her two hands looked very like someone handling a garrotte.
And in the closing moments of Wednesday’s show, she was holding a pair of surgical scissors in the general vicinity of her husband’s trouser department.
Two words spring to mind: Lorena Bobbitt.