In ITV dramas the message is clear: men are all awful
Martin Compston’s character in Our House (ITV) seems like a stand-up guy, but of course he’s not. He’s a man in a TV drama! Everyone knows the rules of TV dramas in general and ITV dramas in particular: the women are marvels and the men are conniving swines. Sure enough, no sooner do we see Compston dishing up spaghetti for the children and urging his wife to enjoy her night out, than the wife comes back to find him bonking a neighbour in the Wendy house.
So there’s the theme of Our House, but here’s the concept. Fi, the wife (played by the wonderfully named Tuppence Middleton), arrives home from a work trip some months after that – at least, I think it’s months, but it’s impossible to keep track of the shifting timelines – to find the place stripped bare, with two strangers in the process of moving in. They are the new owners and have the paperwork to prove it, including documents bearing Fi’s signature. Obviously this is her estranged husband’s doing.
Our House is based on a thriller by Louise Candlish, because the main job of a TV producer these days is to buy up the “women’s thriller” section of Waterstones. I don’t mind telling you that I love silly dramas like this, because the key is not to take them anything like as seriously as they take themselves.
The writers probably want us to root for poor Fi. Instead, we marvel at how long the new homeowners put up with this stressful woman standing in their kitchen yelling: “But this is my house!” Or wonder why she doesn’t tell her best mate that the woman caught in flagrante with her husband is part of their friendship circle.
As for Compston, he is great at playing Bram: a sweaty, lying weasel who says to Fi, while literally on top of the aforementioned neighbour: “It’s not what it looks like!”
The editing, though, is all over the shop. Are these scenes happening right now, or last week, or six month ago? Why is there no establishment of the fact that Fi and the other woman (Weruche Opia) were close friends? Even the estranged couple’s living arrangements – they take turns to live at home with the children or move out to a grotty rental flat, which is apparently known as “bird-nesting” – becomes confusing. In what time frame did Bram manage to clear out this enormous house without Fi noticing?
The cast credits inform us that Rupert Penry-jones will appear in later episodes. He’ll be up to no good. He’s a man, after all. F inally, after limping back onto television with so little energy that you wonder why they bothered, BBC Three has a programme to get people talking. Life and Death in the Warehouse is a fictionalised exposé of the hellish working conditions inside Britain’s distribution centres.
If this story had been told even 10 years ago, it would have seemed like dystopian science fiction. But inside these vast, featureless sites, an army of workers is picking up the packages you ordered online, under conditions that would be described as Orwellian if that wasn’t one of the most over-used descriptors in the English language.
Employees must pick up one item every 30 seconds, directed to the right shelf by a computerised voice on a headset. They cover 15 miles per day. Toilet breaks and “idle time” (pausing at any point between the day’s two official breaks) are monitored on security cameras and timed. All of this is couched in surreal management speak, delivered here by a team leader (Craig Parkinson) and his hateful sidekick (Kimberley Nixon).
Joseph Bullman, who made the excellent BBC Three film Killed By My Debt, teamed up with writer Helen Black to produce this, based on the testimonies of the workers. The setting is a Welsh community where everyone is desperate for the income that this place provides. The focus is on Megan (Aimee-ffion Edwards, excellent) as a trainee manager, who initially tries to help a pregnant employee, Alys (Poppy Lee Friar), but within a matter of weeks has fallen in step with the company’s inhumane culture.
That pregnancy ends in a miscarriage after Alys is worked into the ground. This is where the drama lets itself down – there is something queasily sensationalised about the way it is filmed, and the causal links between physical stress and miscarriage are complex. While there have been reports of similar incidents, it feels like a scenario chosen for shock value.
Aside from that, this was an eyeopening drama that should be required viewing for those of us who mindlessly click “next-day delivery”.
Our House ★★★ Life and Death in the Warehouse ★★★★