If you know what’s good for you, you’ll NEVER go to a dinner party
First rule of horror movies: never go down to the dark cellar. By the same token, if there’s a war on, don’t keep sighing over your sweetheart’s photo . . . you’ll be blown up before the last reel.
And should you find yourself caught up in a domestic mystery thriller where all the lead characters are women, for heaven’s sake stay away from dinner parties. Food poisoning will be the least of your problems.
Who can forget suranne Jones in Doctor Foster, eviscerating her two-timing hubbie (Bertie Carvel) and his much younger girlfriend (Jodie Comer) over the dessert course? that was before Jodie became international assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve, of course.
Lisa ( Anna Friel) recklessly accepted an invitation to dinner, from another mum at the school gates in Deep Water (itV).
the evening went badly from the moment her hostess’s snide sister picked a fight in the kitchen. By the time starters were served, everyone was dredging up ancient grudges and dumping them on the table.
When her husband passed out drunk, Lisa nipped upstairs for a nosey round her hosts’ bedroom and en suite, which is obligatory behaviour at dinner parties on tV. One of the male guests caught her and moments later they were having sex on the marble-top basin. All this could have been avoided if Lisa had opted for a night in watching Gardeners’ World. Dinner parties aren’t glamorous or special. they ruin lives. Just say No.
Deep Water resembles a British version of the immensely successful and starry Big Little Lies, which has just ended its second season on sky Atlantic.
Both dramas revolve around the tangled private lives and secret resentments of three school mums, but where the U.s. blockbuster is set in chic Monterey, California, the backdrop for its English cousin is Windermere in the Lake District.
And while Big Little Lies stuns us with showcase casting for Meryl streep and Nicole Kidman, Deep Water is slightly less Oscarstrewn, though there are simmering performances from rosalind Eleazar as Kate, the highly-strung over-achiever, and sinead Keenan as massage therapist roz, deep in debt and facing eviction.
All the menfolk are useless, naturally. Lisa’s beer-soaked bloke does nothing to help with the children, Kate’s brother-in-law is a lecher and roz’s man has gambled away every penny. He’s even sold the spare tyre from the car. What else would you expect from a man on the telly?
One of roz’s clients offers her a way to earn cash . . . as his subsidised lover. Not so much a ‘friend with benefits’, i suppose, as a ‘friend on benefits’. We’ve seen that plotline earlier this month with samantha Morton in C4’s one-off drama i Am Kirsty. But it doesn’t matter that Deep Water lacks originality: there’s more than enough high drama to whisk us along.
true crime documentaries following real-life police investigations are often steeped in drama, too, but Murder Case ( BBC2) wisely avoided any temptation to emphasise the uncertainty and tension during the hunt for missing mother Julie reilly from Glasgow.
the family’s grief was so raw that this programme, the first of a three-part series filmed over 18 months, could have become insensitive and intrusive.
some parts were almost unbearably sad as Julie’s sister and grown-up daughter shook with anguish, racked as much by the faint hope that she might still be alive as by the near certainty that she was dead.
Other sections were painstaking and slow, as we watched police make a fingertip search of wasteland. this tragic story is only going to get sadder.