SEPTEMBER 14 2019 LISTENER 71
TV REVIEW
T
elevision can still surprise and
I don’t just mean Seven Sharp
redefining current
affairs via an item
on the correct way to eat a
custard square. Something
comes along that is so
unapologetically old school
that it seems positively radi-
cal. Shane Meadows’ The
Virtues will trigger memo-
ries of British kitchen-sink
dramas, from early Ken
Loach – Cathy Come Home,
Up the Junction – to Jimmy
McGovern’s suburban
working-class anthology
The Street. Even early Coro-
nation Street comes to mind,
back when Ken Barlow was,
if not an angry young man,
at least a reliably annoying
floppy-haired whinger.
The Virtues is so flayingly social
realist I wondered if I could survive
the first episode (there are four). See
painter-decorator Joseph head off
from his grim Liverpool council digs
to visit his son, Shea, at the home of
his ex and her new boyfriend. He sits
at the dinner table, a wall of awkward
small talk all that stands between him
and his collapsing world. The dead air
and tentative conversational salvos
alert you to the fact that a lot of the
dialogue is improvised, and it feels all
the more real for that.Social-realist
British series The
Virtues harks back
to searing dramas
of yesteryear.
Virtue signalling
It might all be
as unrelievedly
grim as Hades
but for someseriously funny
interludes.His ex and her new partner are taking Shea off
to a new life in Australia. Joe is about to lose it all.
Again. Cue flashbacks to childhood tragedy, life in
an institution, the ghost of deep trauma.
Scenes this socially excruciating represent the
sort of human interactions we go a long way to
avoid in real life. The Virtues allows no escape. The
viewer is trapped with Joseph in what feels like a
perpetual state of fight/flight anxiety. Joe attempts
to relieve it, after his wrenching goodbye to his son,
by falling off the wagon – well, you would – and
shouting a pub full of strangers with the last ofhis money. Result: a visceral sequence of drink-
and-drug fuelled humiliations to match Benedict
Cumberbatch’s epic debauch in Patrick Melrose.
Back in his flat, Joseph is unconscious in a pool
of vomit. Dear lord. But it’s worth sticking with
The Virtues. As Joseph, Stephen Graham is one
of those actors you will recognise though you
may not know his name, only because the UK is
blessed with bags of such talent. Not many have
the tortured magnetism Graham manages, though,
even covered in regurgitated kebab. He was recently
heartbreaking as undercover cop John Corbett in
Line of Duty.
With nothing to keep him at what passes forhome, Joseph decides to all but walk
to Belfast, to seek out the remnants
of the life he once had there, with its
as-yet-unspoken horrors.I
t might all be as unrelievedly grim
as Hades but for some seriously
funny interludes. In Ireland, Joseph
is taken in by Anna, the sister he was
parted from as a child. He ends up
bunking down in the garage with the
family, including three undamaged,
hilariously over-inquisitive
children – there is hope
in this world – and his
brother-in-law’s troubled
sister.
She arrives brawling with
her boyfriend. No one goes
to help her. They don’t
need to. She decks him
and sends him packing. “I
take it the wedding’s off,”
observes her long-suffering
brother. Dinah’s past, we
find, has its own awful
early damage.
Soon, Anna is having to
pick Joseph up late at night,
legless again. To add insult
to injury, she walks in, with
an offended “Ahem!”, to
find him making out with
Dinah on the couch. “Whatever this
f---ing hilarity is, it’s over right now!
Romeo, get back to your bed.”
Such reprieves are brief. We’re back
to a man scrambling to survive in a
world that betrayed him. The Virtues
is about the legacy of childhood
trauma inspired, in part, director and
co-writer Meadows has said, by his
own. As Joseph says at one desperate,
lonely point, “Peace, it’s all you want,
a bit of peace.” lDIANA
WICHTEL
Final of THE VIRTUES, Sky Rialto, Sunday,
September 8, 8.30pm, and Sky Go.To r tur e d
magnetism:
Stephen Graham
as Joseph.