There are certain phrases that make the spirits of all but the most truly, thoroughly, devotedly highbrow television viewers (and I am not one of the eight left in the country) quail within them. They are "a dramatisation of a narrative poem", "to mark National Poetry Day" and "starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson". They were all deployed in the lead-up to The Song of Lunch.
But, if like me you steeled yourself, searched your soul for parts not yet rendered wholly moribund by a 10-year diet of reality TV and other assorted rubbish, and brought them quivering and blinking into the light, something rather strange happened.
The Song of Lunch – poem by Christopher Reid, direction by Niall MacCormick, brought to fruition against all the odds by the stump of BBC Drama Production – was the story of a man and a woman (played by Rickman and Thompson respectively – it wasn't that artsy-fartsy) who meet for lunch in a Soho restaurant, an old haunt, 15 years after their relationship ended.
She lives a glamorous life in Paris, married to a successful novelist, and is still vibrant, interested in the world and its people. He, on the other hand, has sunk into a melancholy middle age, bored with his publishing job, frustrated with himself and his lack of writing success. They sit across the table, two people in search of a wavelength they once shared but never quite finding it.
And it was wonderful. Every other line of the man's interior monologue – his mineral water's bubbles "mobbing up to greet him", the succour offered by another glass of wine "an insufficient bliss but repeatable later", even the smell of the men's toilets, "that jabbing kidney reek that calls all men brothers" – made you marvel. Rickman was, as apparently effortlessly as always, mesmerising, and even Thompson's apparently ineradicable de haut en bas inflection served her well in the role of a woman confronted with a now pitiable version of her past.
It was quietly moving, clever, beautiful, sad and true. Just wonderful.
