The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
IONA MCLAREN SCREENGRAB
Nothing in the first episode of ITV’s trans drama was clear-cut, which made it all the more compelling
ITV, Sunday
Do most people in Britain have a trans friend? It’s hard to guess, as the number of trans people is unknown, but I would hazard that, for a large chunk of the population, trans is something they read about in the papers, not a way of describing a person they care about.
Butterfly, a three-part drama, might bridge that gap. It was a brilliantly realised portrait of a family tying itself in knots over how to cope with Max (Callum Booth-Ford), a child on the brink of secondary school and the “time-bomb” of puberty, who liked to shimmy around the kitchen in a fluffy pink jumper and confessed in the bath that “I hate my willy […] I wish it would fall off.” Max’s mother, a superb Anna Friel, in the interests of getting through the day, had made it a rule that Max could wear girls’ clothes, but only at their house. For that, she was given grief both by her estranged husband (Emmett J Scanlan, who just “wanted his son back”) and her busybody mother (Alison Steadman).
This could have been a drama about a beautiful victim battling for acceptance: “Max v the world”. Well, it was that, a bit, but less clear-cut. Max, who looked like an anxious lollipop, actually held the power in his family. This was horribly demonstrated when his mother forced herself to get dolled up for a date, only to find Max punishing her by taking a razor blade to himself upstairs. That scene, and seeing Max smile as his parents reunited over his bed in A&E, had to be watched through closed fingers.
The fictional web was drawn so tight that even though you felt ambivalent about Max’s manipulations, there was no doubt his feelings about his body were genuine, and you certainly cared what happened to him, not least for his mother’s sake.
The episode’s cliffhanger ending – with Max coming downstairs as Maxine – left viewers with some urgent questions that were both narrative and philosophical: not just “will he become she?” but also, “is he, in some sense, a she already?”
It was a testament to the pressurecooker effect achieved by Butterfly that Ambulance, the Baftawinning documentary series about 24 hours in the emergency service, felt easier to watch, despite showing real people in real distress.
This episode about Manchester began at 4am, with a crew pummelling the chest of a man whose heart could not be restarted. You might think you’d have to be a psycho to find that easy watching but, somehow, the chipper humanity of the ambulance staff made it so. “Don’t worry, sweetpea,” they said to his wife, as she fretted that she hadn’t done the right thing.
As the day unfolded, the ambulances darted around to give us a panorama of Manchester life, from inebriates at a festival to 95-year-old Marion, who had had a fall and expressed interest in a rose tattoo. “Why don’t you get one then?” they joked. “With a bum like mine?” she squealed. The puzzled doc replied: “You don’t have to have it on your bum.”
In short, Ambulance reduces the viewer irresistibly to three clichés: a) you’ll laugh b) you’ll cry and c) most of all, you’ll want to tell everyone how brilliant the people who work in ambulances are.