Inside Man: Episode 4

 "How does anyone ever get murdered? There's so much admin!"

There so much about this episode that's great. The above line and, indeed, most of Mary's dialogue, which straddles that line between humour and horror. The way a random woman gingerly steps over the trail of blood after Mary is run over. Mary's desperate and almost comical confrontation with Beth. Poor Ben, Harry becoming increasingly unhinged. Grieff's slow acceptance of his fate. That surprising coda with Janice asking Grieff to help her to murder her husband.

But, surprisingly, we aren't told why Grieff killed his wife. Sequel hunting, or a statement that some things are unknowable, as Grieff tells Harry his usual monologue about how all of us, given sufficient desperation, are potential murderers? Probably the latter., as Grieff is, by his own admission, somewhat pressed for time.

This is a satisfying, entertaining finale, with exquisite performances from, in particular, Lyndsey Marshal, Stanley Tucci and David Tennant. Most of all, it's satisfying, in this final episode, to see how Steven Moffat can write himself seemingly into a corner and then seamlessly out of it. Good stuff.

Inside Man: Episode 3

 "Much be so much easier."

"What must?"

"Not believing in Hell."

This is the hardest decision I've had to make for a quote for ages. That says a lot. 

There's a lot of quotable, philosophical dialogue here. But it all emerges from the characters. Harry's police interview is so very cringe. But it exposes Harry. He's a bad man, and a good man. He acted with dselfish desperation towards Edgar, and did not, as he tried to claim, protect him. Yet Edgar watched, and thus funds, child porn. And, let's face it, that suicide note wasa spiteful act of vindictiveness aimed, unknowingly yet culpably, at an innocent teenage boy.

Beth is interrogated, too, on the ethics of her trade as a voyeuristically morbid crime journalist by hardened criminal Morag- who adopts the moral high ground. And Grieff, faced with an actual execution date, reacts not with dignity but with an unexpected desperation. He wants to live, after all. And, despite the fact he mutilated his wife's corpse, apparently the retrieval of her head will explain things. Hmm.

This is building up for a huge finale, with Janice's very justifuable mind games and the horrifying cliffhanger, with Ben locked in the cellar with Janice as the carbon monoxide slowly kills them... and it was Harry who did this, so his wife would not. Because he loves hisfamily so much that he would take their place in Hell. That he would actually download child porn- an evl act in itself, funding more child abuse- to save his son.

This is deep, clever, fascinating. And memory sticks are indestructible, right?

Inside Man: Episode 2

 "There's no reason this has to be uncivilised..."

Look, I really like this programme. Indulge me, and let's pretend, for a couple of minutes, that flash drives are indestructible, ok? It's gripping and fascinating look at how an ordinary "good" person, such as Harry the vicar, can be driven to bad things an, inexorably, to what seems like the inevitable murder of Janice. No doubt, towards the end, we shall hear how Grieff murdered his wife. One thing is certain: Stanley Tucci is simply brilliant.

Yet was Harry, the "dark vicar", ever such a good man as he appeared? Yes, he's doing all this for his son, and he's trapped: even the accusation would ruin Ben, even if he were ultimately acquitted. And yet... I'm not a religious man, but what he does to Edgar in the chaurch, making him confess before God so he can record him, gaslighting and manipulating this rather simple man- yes, I know, a nonce- for his own purposes... I have no concept of blasphemy, personally, but there's a lack of integrity here. And Janice says she never really liked Harry. Was he ever as good a man as he seems?

His wife Mary is fascinating, too. Clearer about what must be done to save her son, yet not really wanting to murder Janice. And Janice is clever. The 9pm Skype call tomorrow will lead, inevitably, to her murder and ther ruin. So she seeks to divide and conquer, offering them both- separately- the chance to postpone that call... in return for an offer. She's very clever.

So, of course, is Grieff, who is truly compelling. Superficially, with his cases- such as the case of the week here- he's Sherlock, but in terms of his character he's very different. He is comforted by the ;prospect of punishment for his crime in a way which is actually rather self indulgent: if he isfulfilling a useful function, one which must inevitably save lives in the fullness of time, what is the social utility of killing him? Will his death not just punish the innocent? Such are the moral contradictions of judicial killing.

And such are the moral quandaries of this programme. Yes, Moffat's clever in an Agatha Christie sort of way, we know and love that. But here he is, on msainstream telly, being brilliant with theme and character. This is outstanding telly.

Inside Man: Episode 1

 "Anyone can wind up in this place..."

One might say, in some ways, that there is much we might have expected from Steven Moffat in this, his long-awaited new drama.There's a character- Jefferson Grieff- who is superficially similar to Sherlock in how he solves crimes. Paul McGuigan directs. It's all very clever, with different plot strands interconnecting at various points. David Tennant star as Harry, our likeable vicar protagonist. Lydia West and Dolly Wells are well known for starring in work by Moffat and his mate RTD.over-complex.

Yet this is not, as no doubt some are saying, just Moffat doing his usual tropes. It is not, as no doubt some are saying, confusing and over-complex. Just pay attention. It's all there. And it's much more than a puzzle box, this is about something.

Harry is a good man, a husband, a father, a lynchpin of his community. So when his verger, with his overbearing (and violent) mother asks him to take from him a drive with "porn", he sees this as a trivial matter. And yet-this being the central premise- a good man can become a murderer, given the right circumstances.

We have a parallel in Jefferson, who seems to have murdered his wife and believes he deserves his upcoming execution. As various conversations hint, he was also a good man who made a wrong decision, and somehow became a murderer. He accepts his fate, and whiles away his time in Death Row solving crimes. Yet the Sherlocking is superficial. The point is that this is a man who has done something evil, though not an evil man. And he accepts the consequences with integrity. Not just death, but to be hated. He actively dissuades Beth from ewriting about him positively. His ideas of "moral worth" are fascinating.

Janice, too, is clever and highly principled, as we see in the opening train scene. And so the terrible misunderstanding is set up, where she finds the verger's child porn, believing it to belong to Harry's son. Harry panics, handles things badly... and Janice ends up locked in the cellar. This is brilliant writing, and acting.

And so we face the consequences. Harry's horrified wife. And the confrontation with Janice, who fully realises the only possible fate for her is to be murdered as Harry, though a good man, has no other way out. But she will not make it easy...

And Beth is on the case. This is superb stuff.

It's a Sin: Part 5

 "I haven't handled this well. I realise this now."

RTD, you magnificent bastard. You have this grown man still teary an hour after seeing the episode, damn you. You get us to like these very human characters, and then you do horrible things to them.

This is an incredible conclusion to a sublime television drama that will be remembered through the ages. Keeley Hawes shows us exactly why she's there in what had previously seemed like a suspiciously small role as Valerie realises what's happening with her dying son ("I've got AIDS. I'm gay" all at once) and reacts with a heartbreakingly realistic sense of denial and a very specific type of bigotry, the bigotry of Middle England and the Daily Mail: the bigotry that sees itself as "common sense". RTD absolutely nails this attitude as Richie's parents whisk him off to the Isle of Wight and keep him away from the people he loves- and Ash, his boyfrend, is stuck in London.

It's not all about Richie's death: Roscoe starts to reconcile with his contrite father, shocked at the treatment of AIDS patients in Nigeria. Valerie says some interesting things about Jil having no life of her own, and we see at the end how Jill, a familiar face to the hospital staff, holds the hands of men dying from AIDS, whether she knows them or not. She's lovely.

The dialogue, the characterisation, the structure, all of them are perfect. The fact that we end not with Richie's death but, like a wake, a flashback to a moment that makes us smile. The lttle things about Valerie's reaction- and how Richie's dad, previously so firm abot Richie's career choices, just collapses emotionally. The skeweing of a sort of stiff-upper-lip English type of family emotion. And, of course, the cruel revelation of Richie having dies alone, kept away from his real family. Jill's parting words to Valerie are powerful and, I think, authorial voice: the real tragedy of AIDS is that so many men died in shame, shame of what they were, shame that is drip, drip, dripped on them by a culture that erases and centures any thing that does not conform to traditional family values. The curse of Middle England, that evil place.

It's a Sin: Part 4

 "Something's wrong with your skin..."

Four episodes in it's quite clear that this series is an extraordinary masterpiece; following Colin's death last episode we have nothing comparable here, but we have somebloody good drama where, yet again, each character gets developed and every character is three dimensional and real. RTD has had a long and distinguised career, but this is his magnum opus.

It's 1988. We get THAT advert. We get a superb bit on Section 28 where Ash also gets to point out how history and culture has erased LGBT+ people for centuries. Well, except for Mary Renault. But this is also a time where the Pink Palace gang are attending funeral after funeral in what looks like a punishing schedule. There's a powerful moment at a funeral where it's pointed out that the vicar hasn't mentioned the dead man's boyfriend, and indeed he has no rights at all.

But greed is good. Richie and Jill have got a mortgage on the Pink Palace- even if Richie has to lie about his sexual orientation; it seems, incredibly, you could be denied a mortgage for being gay. But the fact that Richie and Jill have joined the Thatcherite revolution (Richie even voted Tory!) is soundtracked, inevitably, by Yazz' "The Only Way Is Up". The soundtrack of this entire series is really rather glorious, and often clever in how it uses those well-known '80s hits that have almost become divorced from their original context.

There's a fascinating sub-plot with Roscoe, and his dalliance with a Tory MP, portrayed to perfection by Stephen Fry, who doesn't see himself as gay because he's a top. There's a perfect punchline to this whole sub-plot, and Roscoe himself is a wonderfully nuanced chaacter. I love his outburst about how he loved Colin, but Colin behaved himself, and died- so why behave?

But Richie. Oh Richie. It's implicit, after last episode and given his cautious behaviour throughout, that he is HIV positive, and it's while acting with some Daleks (ah, RTD!) that it becomes clear something is wrong and he has full- lown AIDs. He fails to tell his blood family, who seem to live in a different world, and ends up telling all his friends in the back of a police van after a defiantly awesome demonstration. And the last line is perfect. 

I'll save the real superlatives for the finale; I have high hopes.

It's a Sin: Part 3

 "Don't lose your head..."

Dammit. All these bloody feelings. RTD, you are one magnificent bastard.

Right. Obviously, Colin, but let's touch on the other stuff. AIDS has already touched the Pink Palace and taken Gloria, but at this point evryone is under siege. Lovely Jill is volunteering on the phones to help. Richie has a new boyfriend, a fellow thespian with similarly big dreams- there's an interesting cht about how being "out" means career death ("I Clavdiv's gay!")- but we get the horribly realistic scene of struggling with a condom and then deciding to go without- only for Richie to see the tell-tale carcinomas on his lover's back the following morning. We have a hint that, while Ash and Roscoe are both negative (a miracle for Roscoe), Richie may not be so lucky.

Plus, there's other stuff, like Roscoe making the acquantance of a Tory MP who will presumably be important later as he's played by Stephen Fry. But Colin...

It's clever how it's eventually revealed how Colin got infected- at least he had a few good shags after all. But to die like that, at twenty-four, going senile, is just horrible. Equally vile is the prejudice- from the local copper who locks him in a hospital ward by court order (until a kick-ass solicitor busts his balls in a highly enjoyable scene) to the local firm refusing to do a funeral. But Colin's mum is a truly lovely person, and the bond she builds with the whole gang is a wonderful thing. I'm glad we got a character like that.

But oooh, Colin. This is brilliant telly. But ouch.

It's a Sin: Part 2

 "There's nothing wrong with boys from London."

Wow. That was another masterclass in television drama from RTD, again managing to meld the deeply tragic with the humorously human in a way that feels like life, with his extraordinary flair for dialogue and characterisation. The spectre of AIDS gets closer and closer to our three stars, and again claims the life of someone whom we care about.

Richie and Jill, bookending the episode with a pair of duets, five is a stark contrast. Richie’s oh-so-clever conspiracy theory scepticism gets a gloriously choreographed monologue to camera, quite rightly breaking the fourth wall in ways that remind me of RTD’s Casanova, which I haven’t seen since before this blog existed. And yet, one of those theories he mocks about where AIDS could have come from is, probably, correct.

Jill, meanwhile, is keen to learn the truth, sending Colin on a fact finding mission in New York and being Gloria’s only confidant, with him in a devastating scene as he tries to deny what is happening, and looking after him while vigorously sponging herself and washing up with rigour. It was 1984, and people really did know nothing.

There is much else happening- the sadness of how Roscoe being himself is affecting his family, and the uncomfortable scenes of Colin’s lecherous boss trying to have his way with the young man in a very MeTok sort of way until he spots the AIDS literature Colin’s being collecting- leading shortly thereafter to the most cheerful sacking ever.

What haunts us most, though, is the sight of Gloria’s family, at his wake, throwing all his loved possessions on the fire and rejecting who he is. Horrible.

I’m dreading what awaits us next week. And yet this is extraordinary telly, still on track to be RTD’s masterpiece.

It's a Sin: Part 1

 "You haven't got a parrot, have you?"

Russell T. Davies, after a few quiet years since leaving Doctor Who (alas, said quietness for tragic personal reasons) has not only been very much back over the last few years but is arguable at the very peak of his career right now. Cucumber was perhaps underappreciated, as was Years and Years, but few deny that A Very English Scandal was sublime. If this first episode is any guide (and I'm told reviews are raving from those who've binged the whole thing on All4; I'm soing it week by week), this could be the best thing he's ever done.

RTD has always said he wanted to return to gay themes in recent years, and this series confronts the elephant in the room: AIDS, which destroyed and traumatised a generation of gay men through the cruel double whammy of a horrifying disease and the added cruelty of society. I'm sure we will see much overt homophobia in later episodes (RTD has already shown with truthfully subtle dialogue the casual racism), but just as cruel is the fact that same sex relationships must be covert, informal, unrecognised, existing only at the margins of society. 

We see this, horrifyingly, in the person of Henry, played superbly by Neil Patrick Harris. He's lived with his partner (that unsatisfactory word) Juan Pablo for thirty years, a blissfully married couple in all but name. And yet, when they both become sick with this mysterious new gay plague (and yes, this all has resonance in early 2021, with our plague being less easy to ignore for most than the plague of forty years earlier), Juan Pablo's mother takes him "home" to Portugal and they must both die without seeing each other again. Equally horrifying is the sight of Henry, alone in a ward to himself, food left at the door, with no one approaching unless wearing what we have over the past year come to refer to as full PPE.

This episode is about introducing the characters, however, although not without a little foreboding. RTD is making us like these very human, flawed, likeable individuals before putting them through the wringer. We focus on three young gay men- Richie, student turned actor; Roscoe, who has fled the worst kind of religious fundamenalism with his Nigerian family set on "curing" him; and Colin, a shy young tailor from RTD's part of the world. There's also the very lovely Jill, the heart of the Pink Palace, but this episode shos lots of joyous, hedonistic sex, silliness and young people behaving as young people should, ignorant (and in denial) of what's coming.

Worryingly, we end with our three principals expanding on their dreams for the future. Let's hope at least some of them have one.

This is utterly sublime television. RTD makes it look effortless. I already feel I know and care about these people, and am worried.

Dracula: The Dark Compass

“I knew the future would bring wonders. I did not know it would make them ordinary.”

Wow. Well, I suspect that won't have pleased everyone as much as it pleased me. Moffat's clever structural games and Gatiss' fondness of allusion don't appeal to everyone as much as they do to me. Personally my only concern is that a programme broadcast on the first three days of January could plausibly end up as the best thing on telly in 2020. The episode, and the series, really are that good. And it's not all clever plotting, or smirking when we hear good old Bela echoed in "Children of the night- what music they make". It's also horror, and real, effective horror at that. And heart. Lots of heart. For the record, the end made Mrs Llamastrangler cry.

It's a bold move to properly resolve the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode at the start of the third. It is, though, perhaps even bolder to invite comparisons to Sherlock by fast forwarding to the present day. It's lovely to have, though, after the initial excitement with the helicopters, some time to breathe, and to allow Dracula to acclimatise himself to the twentieth century, a time of wonders for him, where even a poor household has access to untold wonders, and even to chide us on how we take all this for granted.

It really should be an obvious, tired cliche to have Zoe Helsing be a great grand-niece of Agatha who happens also to be played by Dolly Wells, but it somehow isn't, because blood is lives, everyone is drinking each others' blood, and we can be poetically ambiguous about which Van Helsing is which. Likewise, the conceit of having the Jonathan Harker Foundation (nice bit of misdirection with Jack's phone) wanting Dracula for his blood is only really there for characters to meet each other so the plot can happen, but it allows us to meet this version Renfield, played with comical panache by Gatiss, yet again getting away with cheekily writing himself a fun character to play. And it's clever how we see Dracula scoff at the notion of rights- he's a vampire aristocrat, so he's all about blood; he and the probably-going-to-be-reshuffled Jacob Rees Mogg should get on well- only for Renfield to use his legal rights to get him freed.

Alongside Claes Bang, though, the other star is Lydia West as this version of Lucy Westenwra. She may have been bloody good in Years and Years but she's bloody extraordinary in this, perfectly playing the nihilistic charm of the bored, beautiful hedonist. Her dialogue tempts fate, of course- "I'll sleep when I'm dead" and "everyone smiles when you're pretty" are both dead giveaways if you're paying attention. And Dracula soon ends up giving her a regular thrill be feeding off her in at least a bit of a gesture towards Bram Stoker's novel. And yes, of course the feeding is a not-very-subtle metaphor for sex. We expect no less.

But the horror of this conception of the undead is present too, with Dracula calmly informing Lucy that exactly nine occupants of the graveyard are "suffering" in their coffins- and one horrific undead child has managed to get out. The reveal of what it looks like is superbly done.

But the real horror is for Lucy- not her rather erotic and cheerfully longed-for death; not the existential horror of being undead; not even the unimaginable torture of being cremated while conscious. No; it's the fact that she's disfigured, and simply cannot live without being beautiful.

But the ending is not hers; it belongs to Agatha/Zoe, who ends by confronting Dracula over his fear of facing death, the common thread that binds together his weaknesses. I'm not sure this quite works if you look too closely, but it's so artfully done that we don't particularly care. And that final scene of Dracula and Agatha dying together, erotically, with death and orgasm literally metaphors for each other... that's romantic, and perfect. Because the reason why this is sublime, and Twilight is shite, is not that vampires shouldn't be romantic. They absolutely should. But the romance must always be twisted, never vanilla.

Years and Years: Episode 6

"This is the world we built."

Although we start the episode as one might expect- Vivienne Rook is PM, and she does a lot of Trumpy things like shutting down the BBC for being "enemies of the people" and denying Russian involvement in her election.And there's a lot of dystopian detail as per earlier episodes-
bacterial food that was never alive, working class estates being arbitrarily locked in, food banks closing- and Muriel's wonderful voice-of-the-author speech about how things have gone wrong since the millennium but how we're all to blame through wanting cheap stuff without considering the consequences. And there's a lot of horrifying stuff with Viktor and others in concentration cams which look very, very much like, well, you know.

But this is RTD. Things don't carry on through the same dystopian path. There is hope. Yes, it's undercut at the end by the point that the regime was opposed and falling anyway, but we see the Lyons family essentially toppling the government. And I now thing Edith is even cooler and Jessica Hynes deserves a BAFTA. But the point is that the very ordinary family we've been seeing turn out to be heroes- even Rosie and little Lincoln do heir bit against tyranny. Even Stephen goes some way to redeeming himself, much as though it looked for one horrifying moment that he was going to shoot Celeste.

Yet it's not just about the defiant note of hope, the insistence that yes, humans can be right bastards, but we have the potential to redeem ourselves. No; we have a fascinating final ten minutes of poetry as Edith, who I think represents someone the author would like to be, waits to die, and to have her memories and perhaps her consciousness (or just a copy?) uploaded online, perhaps to be immortal. There's a lot of philosophy about consciousness to unpick here, and I'd observe that, in all the futurology that RTD has given us, he's deliberately seemed to avoid the subject of the Singularity, of artificial intelligence becoming sentient. Is this the bit where he addresses such themes head on, being deliberately ambiguous? Is the "I am love" a statement on all this or just the endorphins of a dying woman? I don't know, but these six episode have been first rank telly.

Years and Years: Episode 5

"I’ll just topple the government. How about that?”

It’s 2028. Vivienne Rook is PM and initially little has changed- indeed, Rook’s public statements are just vacuous and meaningless platitudes. But the first thing we see is a critic being suddenly arrested on what looks like trumped up charges, mentioning the “disappeared”. Shades of Pinochet already.

Chez the Lyons there’s a struggle to recover from Daniel’s death, with Stephen visiting Viktor to tell him personally that he blames and will not forgive him. And it’s an even bleaker world- bananas are gone. Global heating means endless rain. Energy crises and co start blackouts mean much of what exists online is erased forever, and there’s an amusing scene of schoolchildren having to get used to this quaint little thing called paper. And then things get truly dystopian with dirty bombs causing radioactive fallouts in two major cities while floods erode the coast. There are floods of homeless refugees, both British and international. And this is less than a decade away.

There are positives; Muriel’s macular degeneration can be cured just like that, albeit at the cost of her family’s inheritance. But this is s world where civil liberties are despised, where “criminal” estates are walled off and where Rosie’s business is closed down because of where she lives. Each episode is getting more dystopian than the last, and scarily plausible in a world that contains such scum as Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins and Donald Trump. I think RTD underestimates the liberal backlash but, this being part polemic, creatively that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

There’s a human side too; an increasingly bitter Stephen lives with a woman he doesn’t particularly like. Edith is increasingly cool and easily my favourite character, but she’s dying. Bethany’s joy at becoming a bionic woman is wonderful- but, as Stephen points out, she has become state property. And Celeste is increasingly bitter at having to be nursemaid to her mother in law. These are very real people, anchoring us to this world.

The shocking conclusion, of course, has Stephen humiliate himself to get a better job with an absolute wanker he went to school with, and briefly meeting Vivienne Rook, who casually mentions that is she ever resigned as PM, “they’d kill me.” And the contract they’re bidding on is one for concentration camps for refugees and other desirables, where Rook plans to solve the overcrowding problems by “letting nature take its course”. Because this is inevitably where far right populism leads.

The human dimension adds extra horror, too, as Stephen deliberately moves Viktor to the extermination camp. And Bethany knows...

This is utterly sublime.

Years and Years: Episode 4

"Turns out we were born in a pause..."

This is a bloody brilliant piece of telly. There’s so much going on, obviously- not least the fact we finally see Vivienne Rook attaining power, the consequences of which we are no doubt about to see. But the plot is about two things. Firstly, Celeste gives Stephen his comeuppance for his affair by humiliatingly outing him in front of the whole family, which crushes him- Gran’s reaction is devastating enough, but Bethany's Parting question is “What colour is she?” and, on being told she’s while, simply “bye”. Ouch. And, in a masterfully scripted couple of scenes, it’s clear that his lover is beginning to tire of him anyway, and unhappy being stuck with him.

We also see Rosie starting a new business and getting a rather annoying new boyfriend, and start to see just how far Edith would go to protect her family. There’s a lot of love here.

But most of the episode focuses on the incredibly tense and dramatic attempt by Daniel to get Viktor over to the UK rather than facing possible disappearance or even execution in the Ukraine. This gets a lot of screen time, but ends with the incredibly dangerous sight of dozens of people being crammed into a dinghy and pushed across the channel. The screen goes black and we see just a couple of horrifying flashes, and then we’re on a beach on the south coast of England with emergency services everywhere. Daniel is dead and we end with Viktor in their house alone, alive but empty.

RTD’s brilliance at writing character and drama is very much on display here, but it’s also a scarily plausible version of a near future of 3-D printed villages and burgers without beef, of deepfake videos, of Grexit, turmoil in Italy and a bankrupt Hungary, as America bans equal marriage and overthrows Roe vs Wade. This reveals itself to be better and better every week. So I’d better catch up quick...

Years and Years: Episode 3

"The gig economy, that's me."

Things slow down a bit in the third episode as the characters get a chance to breathe and respond from the huge events that ended both the first two episodes. But there’s a very definite sense that civilisation is declining as the 2026 election day looms.

There’s humanity, though, which stops things getting too depressing- RTD is a master at using time like this. Yes, Daniel and Viktor are separated, Viktor is in huge danger from bigoted wankers, and it’s all quite heartbreaking. But their love and devotion for each other is touching, and it’s wonderful to see Viktor make it to Spain, where the internment camps have conjugal arrangements.

But this is a moment of hope in the context of rising bigotry. We also see the hollowing of the muffle class as Steve and Celeste are forced to stay with Gran and replace their nice professional jobs with gig economy drudgery with appalling conditions. Meanwhile, Bethany and her fellow transhuman Lizzie are exploited into handing over £10,000 for a horrifying botched operation to replace their eyes with cameras- fortunately Beth escapes. There’s artificial meat, all cars seem to be electric, but society isn’t heading in a pleasant direction.

Yes the deaths of the siblings’ father allows them to bond at his funeral in another moment of humanity. Never mind that Rosie has lost her job, Steve is forced to take what work he has, Edith is dying and Daniel’s partner is in a cell. They have each other, even if Edith (easily my favourite character), er, drinks her father.

Seems with Celeste, proud and stoic to the last, discovers that Steve has been having an affair, and the election results are revealed- Tories and Labour finely balanced with the odious Vivienne Rook holding the balance of power. Simple and narratively necessary, I suppose, but where are my beloved Lib Dem’s? And what about the Norn MP’s? Whatever, the march of dodgy populism proceeds onwards. More superb telly although, after a superlative second episode, this is merely great rather than superlative.

Years and Years: Episode 2

"This is a different country to the one I left..."

First episodes of new dramas are always, to an extent, set up, introducing us not only to the premise and the setting but also to the cast. It’s the sign of a great writer that, after seeing the first episode once, I started this second episode with a firm grasp of who was who, and feel that I know all the characters. And that’s important; a high concept, somewhat dystopian tour through the near future would be very dry without real humanity and character. Fortunately RTD has never been faulted with either of those.

So we really feel for Stephen and Celeste in the final scenes as a bank collapse robs them of the money paid for their house, and they become homeless and forced into an awkward dependence on Gran. The bank run scenes are a masterful marriage of writing and direction, with the policeman keeping order joining in at the end, a nice touch. And yet the world isn’t unremittingly awful in spite of everything as there is still booze, love and laughter, even in a world with s President Pence and where Putin is dictator for life. Yet the horrors are real; the immigration nightmare for Daniel and Victor, happy in their life until Daniel’s wanker of an ex has Viktor ruthlessly reported to a place where he is far from safe. It’s about time that serious TV drama showed us the barbarism of May’s “hostile environment”.

Edith is back, and back properly, with her characterisation quite a clever piece of writing. She’s had a huge dose of radiation, and probably has ten years before the cancer gets her, leading her to say “sod this” to a life of activism and just enjoy herself. As she says, it’s too late to sort the climate crisis and the mass extinctions; we must now deal with the consequences and they are brutal. So carpe diem. Not only that; she reacts to a creepy hustings with Vivienne Rook with “smash the world!” She seems not to care any more. Oh, there are flashes, as when she says “don’t do that” as Rook appropriates a superficial feminism for her own ends, but this is a terrifying cynicism.

Ah yes, the extraordinary Emma Thompson as Rook, propeller I to a by-election by a very RTD incident where the sitting MP gets decapacitated by a drone which is robotising Manchester’s workforce. Eat your heart out, William Huskisson. Her speech is utterly terrifying, as is her ignorance.

This episode has gone up a notch. This is more than “very good”.

Years and Years: Episode 1

"Don't know if I could have a kid in a world like this."

RTD is back, after last year's superb A Very English Scandal, with the start of a new six-part drama which seems to have the critics wowed but is, well, very good (this is RTD) but not quite up there with The Second Coming.

We have four Lyons siblings- Rosie, Daniel, Stephen and the globe-trotting polemicist Edith, all glued together by their irascible, politically incorrect gran, and it is through them that we are to experience the next few decades, beginning here and now in 2019- so contemporary that a cleverly last mo ute piece of dialogue references the death of Doris Day. All of these characters immediately come to life as RTD gives them very real and very relatable dialogue, as always. Yet the constant backdrop of ominous news, and the little soliloquy of Daniel (the author’s representative?) makes it clear that this is a world where the future looks anything but bright- and yes, he’s not the only one who feels that something has been very wrong ever since the banks buggered things up in 2008. And through all this we see the slow rise of the blunt populist politician Vivienne Rook, played superbly by the great Emma Thompson.

We then go through the next six or seven years, through Trump’s re-election, through a new king, through nuclear tensions between China and the USA, and through a refugee crisis caused by an, er, Soviet (what???!!) invasion of Ukraine. We also see such things as Snapchat filters moving to the real world and Stephen’s daughter coming out as “trans”- by which she means “transhuman”; she wants to go to a Swiss clinic, destroy her flesh and upload herself to live forever as data. Wow. This would, of course, be literal death; the data uploaded would just be a copy. You would be gone. But I’m sure there will be those who think this way and it’s a clever thing to include. And this helps us get to know bewildered father Stephen and his very middle class wife Celeste.

We also see the gradual collapse of Daniel’s marriage to his stupid husband Ralph, who embraces silly internet conspiracy theories and decries those who won’t consider that the Flat Earthers, 9/11 triggers or Moon landing deniers “could be right” as closed minded. This kind of stupidity is, it can’t be denied, the main bad thing about the internet. And these people vote, usually for populist bullshit. This sort of thing isn’t harmless. We also see some staggering ignorance about Ukrainian refugees- “I voted Leave.” Grr.

And then there comes a siren, nuclear war between China and the USA, chaos, family recriminations and Edith dying in Vietnam with a big mushroom cloud. And fade to black. This is very good stuff indeed, it’s just that RTD can do much better than “very good”.