I’ve said it once, but I’m a professional, so I’ll say it again: this is a review. I’m not going to go out of my way to include spoilers about last night’s new BBC drama, One of Us, but there will be some. Because this is a review, from the Latin revidere, meaning to have another look at the thing, albeit in a different medium and possibly over breakfast. Maybe eggs and bacon if you live that kind of life, maybe a black coffee grabbed from Starbucks before you vaulted on to the train, a trenchcoat curling stylishly round your ankles as you went. I just don’t know. But I do know that you should stop reading now if you haven’t yet seen the programme. It’s a drama involving a murder and I’m bound to let drop something you would prefer not to know. Off you go. Bookmark, by all means, but then go. Thus will the greatest happiness to the greatest number of viewers and readers be brought, to which single goal is my being always strung.
Right. To the meat of the thing. One of Us (BBC1) got there rather quicker than I did, deftly painting a happy picture of childhood sweethearts Adam and Grace – she heavily pregnant by the time Adam was recapping their history during his speech at their wedding – before swiftly killing them off on their return from honeymoon. Lee, a knife-wielding crackhead who departs from the flat with a bagful of semi-floggable goods, seems to be the culprit. But as he then deviates from standard murderer behaviour by heading straight for the victims’ parents’ homes – they are still neighbours out in desolate countryside, down Much Foreboding Lane – one must entertain the possibility that all is not quite as it seems.
Nor is it anywhere else. Adam’s brother, Rob, is stalking the man who raped his girlfriend, Anna. Grace’s brother, Jamie, is secretly monitoring messages between Adam’s sister and her ex-husband Sam – who, it is hinted, was a bad ’un. And the victims’ mothers (one, played by Juliet Stevenson, is a recovering alcoholic; the other not) are at loggerheads. Jamie himself has an unspecified past but, his mother insists “he’s got his head straight now”. She also suspects Adam brought about the killings somehow because he and Rob “are their father’s sons! The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!”
I should note here that this is the kind of drama where everyone has a lot of secrets and says things such as: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” There is also – once Lee crashes his stolen car as he zooms inadvisably fast up Much Foreboding Lane in a thunderstorm and they match his face to the one being flashed up on the news as the murder suspect’s – much hyperventilating and tearful screaming.
The families put the badly injured Lee in a cage in a barn. Rob secretly cancels the ambulance and does not call the police as instructed. In the morning, Lee – who has inexplicably been left unattended overnight even by Claire, a nurse who treated his injuries as best she could but then evidently considered her duty and interest at an end – is found with his throat cut. Jamie was seen by Grace’s family’s friend entering the barn but did he do it? We do not know.
Do we care? I am not sure. There really was a lot of hyperventilating and “what are you saying” to encourage characters to spell out things that even the dimmest viewer had understood quite some time ago. The fog of mystery never quite thickened to the necessary proportions, but there’s every chance – especially now the police (headed by a DI dealing drugs to pay for her sick daughter’s operation) are, despite Rob’s machinations, on their way – it will gather more thickly next week and swirl us nicely into autumn.
***
I am afeard for the rookies in Rookies (ITV, 9pm). This new documentary series follows Surrey police’s latest cohort of newbies through their first months as officers on the street. “I’m probably,” says former dance teacher Tyne, thoughtfully, “bricking it a little bit.” “She’s nervous in a good way,” says her supervisor, firmly. Anthony – a big lad who starts every day with an early morning muscle-building session in the gym (“I like looking at something and knowing I can pick it up”) – is more excited. He helps arrest a man during a domestic violence incident, but he breaks a colleague’s leg in the process. It is “just” bad luck, but a short, sharp reminder nevertheless that most of us spend our days far from the remotest likelihood of such a possibility in the course of our jobs. I’d be bricking it, too. I’m bricking it for them.
