SHOW+TELL

The superb Toni Collette is looking to re-inject the lust in her marriage in her new prime-time series

BECAUSE OF HER startling turn in the outrageous horror film Hereditary earlier this year, the stock of actress Toni Collette has rarely been higher. Ever since her sensational breakout in Muriel’s Wedding, Toni has managed her career with flawless precision. She’s done superior mainstream in The Sixth Sense and prickly indie with Little Miss Sunshine. Her pull is magnetic and true. What she hasn’t done, until now, is suburban bedroom British TV. Enter Wanderlust.

The sad dramatic exploration of what happens when sex goes out of a marriage has been tackled on screen before. Lars von Trier made typically heavy weather of it, adding crippling injury, the Scottish Highlands and mental breakdown in the bombastic bleak-buster Breaking The Waves. Russell T Davies investigated its gay angle with his crisp humour and deep pathos in Cucumber. Wanderlust is the handiwork of Nick Payne, fresh from theatre hit Constellations and new to TV.

Toni stars as Joy (a heavy-handed and ironic pun on The Joy Of Sex, one assumes). She’s recovering from a cycling accident, which has put paid to the depleted fun in her middle-aged boudoir with husband Alan (Steven Macintosh). When the opportunity for careless infidelity presents itself to them, they grab it with both hands. Quite literally in Joy’s case, as she pleasures a local police officer after aqua-aerobics. His dalliance is sound-tracked by Warren G’s Regulate (cue more heavy symbolism).

There’s something Middle Englandbaiting about Wanderlust, including an early scene where Joy’s mildly deplorable son interrupts her mid-masturbation. But too often I found myself wondering why I was watching a miserable family not being attracted to one another. The answer to the parental lack of spark seems pretty self-evident: she’s hot, he’s not. Whatever solutions they’re going to conjure up for repairing their physical ennui can be answered in one easy word: divorce. Any mystery of what it is that causes couples to go the full platonic is thus removed. Somewhere in this series there is an old Mike Leigh film trying to break out. It’s a shame it doesn’t have a little more of his discreet love of humanity injected. Begins Tuesday 4 Sep, 9pm, BBC One