The Eccleston touch
The versatile English actor plays the well-meaning but blundering grandfather of an autistic boy.
Christopher Eccleston, who has played Thomas Hardy’s Jude, an evil Duke of Norfolk, John Lennon and the son of God and delivered one of British television’s greatest death scenes, is lightening up.
In The A Word (UKTV, Sky 007, Wednesday, 8.30pm), he is the comic relief, the member of the family who navigates his grandson’s autism diagnosis with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. He’s the conduit for all the stupid things people say when confronted with a syndrome they don’t understand.
The six-part series is written and created by Peter Bowker, a former teacher of children with disabilities, and features a family in the Lake District whose youngest son, Joe, is socially isolated, obsessed with his father’s 80s CD collection and disappears to walk the same road every morning.
Parents may recognise the air of slight desperation as mum Alison (Morven Christie) and dad Paul (Lee Ingleby) make allowances for Joe, covering for him at his own birthday party and driving him around in a car to get him to sleep. There are also subplots involving the return of Paul’s brother Eddie (Greg McHugh) and his wife (Vinette Robinson), and Eccleston’s Maurice, a blunt-talking widower who is taking singing lessons (yes, he sings, badly).
This is the third time Eccleston has worked with Bowker, whom he admires hugely. “He’s also a personal friend, so I knew it would be quality,” he says. “I liked the imagination of the programme-makers that they’d approach me for a role like that because it needs a light touch, which I’m not known for.”
Maurice decides there is something wrong with Joe and takes it on himself to have him looked at. Bad idea, but he, of course, thinks he’s doing the right thing. “He’s my grandson,” he says. “It’s my business too!”
“Peter is dealing with the stages, which are, some people say, like grief,” says Eccleston. “When you realise that the child at the centre of your heart and the centre of your family has a condition such as this, there are stages of grief that must be gone through – denial, anger, acceptance.
“It was a huge part of the series, the emotional impact and the differing ways that individuals in the family deal with it.”
It’s a terrific performance from little Max Vento as Joe, and a second series has been commissioned, so there is scope to keep on telling his story.
“The hope for the series is that it will grow as Max grows, ideally.”