To those despairing at the folly of christening their child Khaleesi, spare a thought for those named Sam.
In The Virtues, Channel 4’s latest grit-and-bear-it drama from Shane Meadows (This is England), amid the sad and the damned the character most beyond redemption is Sam (Michael Starke), a ticket inspector-cum-jobsworth who delights in torturing haggard wayfarers to extremes.
“I hope your mother loves you,” roars Stephen Graham’s Joseph, forced to wait for a ferry for another 11 hours. “She does,” chirrups Sam. We have all met a Sam. Sam is appalling.
It’s a moment of light relief in this broiling, brutal portrayal of suffering and self-destruction, writ beautifully across a greyscale Sheffield by Meadows and Jack Thorne. For lovers of Scandi noir, these lingering shots of uncaring industrial zones are peak bleak.
The journey begins not at a crossroads but stuck in a van on an arterial road to, well, nowhere, as Joseph’s meagre life disintegrates. His ex-wife, her new partner and Joseph’s own young son are moving to Australia – they promise to Skype – his lonely world is becoming smaller, his demons, drink after drink, are closing in.
The camera grabs Joseph, “f****** knackered” as broken down as the estate he lives in. It doesn’t let go, pushing up beneath his nose with the claustrophobic persistence of a pitchside photographer trying to capture each anguished twitch in the face of a beaten finalist.
There is an absolute racer of a sequence as Joseph, played to the brink of perfection by Graham, teeters late at night between immortality and immolation in a pub full of strangers, buying rounds for all and barely avoiding some violent kinetic conclusion. A watery fish-eye lens shot is held as he then runs into the night. It’s a joyride. It’s a handcart to hell.
A knuckle-shredder of a first episode starts at a painstaking crawl, dogging each small journey (at first there’s rarely a cutaway of more than five yards). It’s close, all the more to feel it, funny and fierce in Graham’s lightning-quick, semi-improvised patter – typical Meadows territory – and punchy but all truly horrible too.
Yes, this is a wincing watch. Those who have known someone close on the rack of alcohol dependency will stiffen as Joseph heads to the bottom of the hole. He wakes up in his own vomit. Flashbacks play out in snatches like found footage – has there been some past abuse in his life? He threatens to down a filthy bottle of something in a playground full of children.
The pacing is extraordinary, a veering death drive on a road with no finish line in sight. At times you wonder not just what Joseph has done, but where this is going, and whether we can bear it.
But this is not the end – stick with it – as he takes a ferry from Liverpool to Belfast, towards a past we’ve yet to uncover. As an opening chapter in masterful television writing, it’s a paean to the agony of existence. When you reach rock bottom, you can always go back the way you came.
The Virtues airs on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday, May 15.
