Mother’s double life is a brilliant twist on the secrets and lies thriller
The great post-mortem house clearance . . . that’s a grim notion, and don’t tell me you’ve ever contemplated it without a shiver of dread.
Perhaps the duty of clearing out your parents’ home will one day fall to you. Or maybe, when you’re gone, your family will have to sort through your belongings. either way, it’s not a cheery thought for a Tuesday morning.
For sisters Becca and Rosaline in Maryland (ITV), the job of clearing out their late mum’s house proves triply terrible. For one thing, they didn’t know she even possessed her own property — both women thought their mother and father were living together, more or less happily, sharing everything . . . even their reading glasses.
For another, the house is on the Isle of Man, a place completely unfamiliar to them. And worst of all, there are drawers full of clothes belonging to a man they have never met. Their mum, Mary, who was found dead on the beach, had been living a second life, completely hidden from her daughters.
It’s a great twist on the genre of ‘domestic secrets and lies’. Becca (Suranne Jones) and Rosaline (eve Best) have been betrayed, not by unfaithful husbands or devious teenagers, but by their parents.
And as the layers of treachery peel away, they discover their mother had friends, hobbies and wealth they
had never suspected. Mary even kept secret the truth about her own parents. Whether their dad, Richard (George Costigan), ever suspected all this, we can’t be sure. he seems a bit bewildered, but it isn’t yet clear if that’s grief or dementia.
The opening hour of this threepart drama presented an intriguing set-up. There’s a hint that the story, by writer Anne-Marie O’Connor, might tip over into a conventional crime drama. I hope it doesn’t.
One of Mary’s friends, Cathy (played by Stockard Channing, who was Rizzo in the movie musical Grease), is the island’s geriatric dope dealer. It’ll stretch credulity too far if Mary turns out to have been a gangland drugs baron.
I’d prefer to see more of the emotional repercussions for the sisters’ testy relationship. Rosaline is repressed, a tight-lipped businesswoman with a toyboy back in London, and always making Important Calls on her mobile.
Becca is put-upon and likes it that way. Being everybody’s doormat gives her a purpose in life, so she lets herself be pushed around by her teenagers, her dad and her husband. It’s not a role we associate with Suranne, a million miles from her strident Gentleman Jack persona, and she plays it well.
She was particularly convincing as she shuffled into the mortuary to view the body, looking for all the world in her shabby mac as if she’d just been out to the greengrocer’s to get a bag of potatoes.
We’ll learn more about the sisters tonight and tomorrow as we excavate the family past. excavation is the key to Sir David Attenborough’s wonderful dinosaur show, too — that, and a budget as big as a diplodocus.
The CGI masterpiece Prehistoric Planet (AppleTV+) returns for a second series, the digital animation more convincingly realistic than ever as it recreates the world 66 million years ago.
Once again, everything about these documentaries is designed to look like a traditional Attenborough wildlife epic, such as Planet earth. each episode studies a different habitat, starting with islands.
The stork-like hatzegopteryx proved an instant star with its flamboyant mating ritual. When I spoke to producer Mike Gunton earlier this month, he told me the first series sparked endless ‘fan art’ on social media, as viewers posted their own dino-drawings.
even prehistoric monsters are Instagram addicts now.