Like waiting for a train crash…in a good way!
No Return
UTV, Monday
The BRIT Awards 2022 UTV/Virgin Media Two, Tuesday
Anxiety is not something that often troubles me, but I felt it mounting on Sunday and Monday nights watching the BBC’s latest brilliant drama, Chloe. There’s no way to avoid spoiler alerts here, I’m afraid. It’s the story of Becky Green, a misfit young woman living with a mother who has earlyonset dementia, and whose humdrum life is enlivened by the social media feed of Chloe Fairbourne, whose life seems quite fabulous to Becky.
When Chloe takes her own life, Becky decides to enter her world. Assuming the name Sasha, she gatecrashes art gallery openings and inveigles her way into Chloe’s social circle, inventing a backstory about living in Japan for four years, engineering ‘spontaneous’ meetings, and gradually becoming accepted by the group.
Soon, she has her eyes on the prize, to take ownership of everything Chloe owned, not least her grieving husband Elliott (Billy Howle), now a Tory candidate in a by-election. By the end of the second episode, she is in his bed, exploiting his vulnerably and loneliness, but also has found out that far from attending a clinic in Bristol for IVF treatment, Chloe was having contraceptive injections that would work long term.
Why did she not want to have children with Elliott? And, more to the point, what was Chloe’s real relationship with Becky, since we now have found out that they were teenage best friends, and maybe even lovers?
At the heart of it all is Erin Doherty as Becky (you might remember her as Princess Anne in The Crown), and she is utterly mesmerising as she switches like a chameleon between both personas. There is every likelihood she just is a malevolent gold digger who will stop at nothing to assume Chloe’s life, the one over which she has obsessed on social media. But it also is entirely possible she is an avenging angel out to punish this fairly vapid group of friends for not doing more to help Chloe when it was clear she suffered from depression.
One hanger-on to the group, Josh, had slept with Becky when she was Becky and knows that Sasha is a carefully constructed alter ego, but he is more intrigued by it than repelled, so he keeps her secret from the others. There are, though, so many potential traps, I found myself getting anxious on Becky’s behalf. It only can be a matter of time before her fibs trip her up, but so far she has got away with it. Waiting for it all to unravel, and to see the reaction of those who truly care for her, especially events organiser Livia (Pippa BennettWarner) who foolishly invests her trust, is like watching a train about to crash.
There are clever things to say about how we live today – the ease
with which we take people at face value because everyone projects a version of themselves on Instagram
that might be very far indeed from the reality. Becky/Sasha has taken it to a new level, but for how long can she pull off the tightrope act? I have no idea, but I’m hanging around to find out.
I’m not so sure I’ll do the same for UTV’s No Return, the third new drama this year to star Sheridan Smith, after Four Lives and Teacher. This time, she’s a mum on holiday in Turkey with her husband and two daughters (confusingly, the husband is played by Michael Jibson, her inept and unsympathetic family liaison officer in Four Lives).
Their 15-year-old son Noah (Louis George Serkis, son of Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis) goes to a beach party with people he has met at the resort, but soon after he returns home, the police burst into the apartment and take him away for questioning about a sexual assault. To add to the parents’ confusion, he is accused of assaulting a younger boy, when they had only a mild inkling he might be gay.
He denies everything, and they believe him, hiring a sleazy lawyer to defend him (Philip Arditti, relishing every second as he chews the scenery), but nothing here is cut and dried, any more than it is in Chloe.
The problem is that most of it is unsubtle. The arresting police are a caricature of how we might expect Turkish police to behave, and the usual suggestion that maybe money might change hands to make it all go away feels unnecessarily xenophobic. Smith is as compelling as ever – no one does protective mama quite as well as she does – but it’s hard to see how this will stretch to five more episodes, and harder still to imagine myself persevering with them.
THE BRIT Awards (UTV/Virgin Two) got a new host this year, Mo Gilligan of The Masked Singer panel. He clearly is very popular with younger audiences, who took to Twitter to say how brilliant he was, but I honestly couldn’t tell you a single thing he did or a single line he uttered that was in any way memorable.
Mind you, since I also didn’t have a clue who half the winners were, never mind the nominees, it surely is time to acknowledge the BRITs no longer really are for me.
As for the gender neutral stance adopted by the awards, with an Artist of the Year rather than male and female awards, well, Gilligan rather hexed that in the intro by saying ‘good evening, gentlemen’. He clearly needs to attain Becky levels of self-confidence to look even remotely convincing.