Rarefied but ravishing, these Rockets have lift off
If you’re looking for dark secrets among the upper classes – and Julian Fellowes is busy – then Stephen Poliakoff is your man. No matter how far removed the protagonists – the black American bandleader of Dancing on the Edge, the demobbed soldier caught up in atomic espionage in Close to the Enemy – his stories always come around to this, sooner or later.
With Summer of Rockets (BBC Two), he showed his hand earlier than usual. It began with Samuel Petrukhin (Toby Stephens), a Russian-jewish émigré, inventor and hearing-aid designer (like Poliakoff ’s father, on whom this series is based) in top hat and tails and off to the races at Goodwood. Joining him, his family of society outsiders: wife Miriam (Lucy Cohu), debutante daughter Hannah (Lily Sacofsky), eight-year-old son Sasha (Toby Woolf) and taciturn black colleague Courtney (Gary Beadle).
Only war hero-turned-mp Richard Shaw (Linus Roache) and his quietly anguished wife Kathleen (Keeley Hawes) gave them the time of day, with a bond forming when Kathleen revealed that her aunt (an imperious Claire Bloom) just happened to be in the market for a hearing aid. Samuel, meanwhile, was trailed by both an alarmingly aquiline Mark Bonnar and
a succession of shadowy men in hats. In the background, atomic experiments and the space race dominated the headlines.
It was a typical Poliakoff set-up: familiar, (self-)indulgent and slightly eccentric, as reflected in its creator’s peculiar idea of dramatic tension. Whether it was the public unveiling of Samuel’s new “staff locater” gizmo (a bleeper to you and me) or Hannah, having snapped one stiletto heel, trying to break the other so she could make her appointment with the Queen, these were rococo dilemmas that left the edge of my seat untouched.
Yet for all that, it was a promising start, ravishingly appointed and languidly paced as usual, yet packed with potentially intriguing stories that worried away enticingly at Poliakoff ’s other preoccupations. Prejudice stalked establishment institutions, whether it was Sasha’s boarding school, the Houses of Parliament or Lord Wallington, Timothy Spall’s civil but condescending earbender to the great and good. Mental health surfaced in Shaw’s PTSD, as the veteran suffered episodes in which he fought battles long since won.
The cast worked hard to tether the rarefied thing to reality. A restrained, enigmatic Stephens reminded us why he was once so feted, Hawes was as reliable as always and Roache appealingly erratic. Summer of Rockets cleared the launch pad, but the landing may yet prove a bumpy one.
Shane Meadows is as focused on visceral naturalism as Poliakoff is removed from it. The plot of the second episode of The Virtues (Channel 4) could be summed up in a couple of sentences – Joseph (Stephen Graham) tracked down his estranged sister (Helen Behan) in Northern Ireland, met her family and got a job on her husband Mike’s (Frank Laverty) building site – but complex human drama roiled relentlessly under the surface, seeping out between the cracks of repressed emotions and buried memories.
Graham was as gutwrenchingly compelling as ever, his Joseph damaged by a rootless childhood in care (the details of which remained hazy), desperate for affection and yet with a characteristically edgy unpredictability ensuring that the tension never sagged; when Mike (Frank Laverty) ill-advisedly brought up a workmate’s past conviction for flashing, Joe was immediately on edge and so were we.
But Behan, a Meadows discovery first deployed in This is England 88, matched Graham at every turn, particularly during one 10-minute scene in which they talked tearfully and haltingly for the first time in decades, sketching in the gaps while plainly holding plenty back. It demonstrated the treasures to be mined from Meadows’s loosely structured, semi-improvised style which allows characters to behave like people, making inappropriate jokes, talking in circles, stuttering, umming and apologising. In the wrong hands, it would be stultifying. These were not the wrong hands.
Horror lurks around the corner, undoubtedly, yet The Virtues is remorselessly humane, deeply felt and gruelling but never gratuitous. These were fundamentally decent people, straining to understand each other. It offered some hope that the climax may contain some sort of redemption. It’s the least these characters deserve.