The currently ubiquitous Sheridan Smith plays the late Lisa Lynch, whose diagnosis of breast cancer at 28 led to her writing a blog about her battle with the illness. We have problems with dramas depicting real-life victims of terminal illness, not least that you know how it ends and it's depressing.
Lisa's blog, 'Alright Tit', led to a book, produced after her op and chemo when she was in recovery, before finding out that the cancer had spread to her bones and brain. Her therapist then recommends a book to help her, which turns out to be Lisa's own. (Seriously? The therapist didn't twig that her client of the same name and with the same illness might just have been the author?) It was a funny, honest and even uplifting 90 minutes, and Lisa's battle, with the support of her husband and family, was a remarkable one, but ultimately it was still an emotional wrencher of a drama for a holiday Sunday evening.
This is the sequel to 2008's 'The Devil's Whore' which had a starry cast (Andrea Riseborough, Dominic West, John Simm, Michael Fassbender, Maxine Peake and Peter Capaldi, to name a few) and some well-phrased moments but was essentially a missed opportunity for original historical drama. Freed from the constraints of a source text or a biopic, it featured a fictional character living through the turbulent years of the English Civil War, but the heroine, Angelica Fanshawe (then Andrea Riseborough, now Eve Best) took an improbably romantic journey through every major issue and player of the day. The original drama left her back in her ancestral home, with a new baby daughter and an enlightened view of the world.
So, this wasn't exactly eagerly anticipated by us, and the synopsis of two parallel (and inevitable) romances taking place in England and America seemed to be aimed squarely at fans of Philippa Gregory. Those fans won't have been disappointed. Everyone looks impossibly lovely and clean (Dornan is a model, and with 'The Fall' is the only recognisable actor here, although Hope is played by Jane Campion's daughter Alice Englert and Freya Mavor (Beth) was previously in the adaptation of Gregory's 'The White Queen'). Both 'worlds', England and Massachussetts, are depicted as lands of fierce struggle, against which backdrop our two pairs of lovers experience the sort of 'their eyes met...' epiphanies that have them changing the course of their lives in mere minutes. There is clumsy exposition, to explain the back story, and equally clumsy visual symbolism with white nighties, fresh and copious blood, dark woods and bedraggled heroines. The American chapter is basically a 'first of the Mohicans', complete with the spectacular, deliberate fall from a cliff and a scalping.
Most disappointing of all is the childlike black and white depiction of the English Civil Wars as simple struggles by the liberal and the poor against a wicked tyrant King who wants to rule without Parliament. Charles II may have been other than a Merry Monarch to many of his subjects, but he's portrayed here as a virtual Caligula. This seemed to have more in common with 'The Musketeers' than any serious adult drama, not least the very 21st Century women who take up arms and pursue their men with the zest of post-sexual revolution feminists. Hard to believe that Flannery was responsible for 'Our Friends in the North'.
