THE WAY WE WERE (US - BBC MINISERIES)

 

There's something oddly comforting right now about TV programmes centred around travel.

After eight months of Coronavirus restrictions and a summer where a lot of people chose to abandon their holidays abroad for something closer to home, watching Michael Palin or Richard Ayoade visiting other countries has offered us a glimpse of the world we once had and the freedom we would like to return to.

Dramas like 'Normal People' and 'I May Destroy You' have served as a reminder during lockdown of the thrill of an experiencing another culture.

And as we head into a difficult autumn and winter in the battle to contain Covid, David Nicholls' 'Us' on BBC1 provides a similar service - keeping the flame of a return to foreign travel flickering.

Adapted by Nicholls from his 2014 novel, it is essentially the study of a floundering marriage and a European rail odyssey that might get it back on the tracks.

Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves play a middle aged couple, Douglas and Connie Petersen who begin the four part miniseries with her delivering the bombshell that she is thinking of ending their two decades' long marriage.

Douglas is desperate to do anything he can to keep the marriage alive but, as they unpack a supermarket home delivery in their kitchen, it seems pretty clear that those hopes are very much on life support.

With their son Tom Taylor's Albie due to fly the family nest for art college, the Petersens have planned an epic European holiday taking in Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Venice, Florence and Barcelona.

However rather than abandon that plan, Connie remains open to the idea of one last family blowout before they separate.

Douglas sees the holiday differently 

To him, it represents one last opportunity to persuade Connie not to leave and it can also help him connect with Albie who has always been much closer to his mum.

However on the Eurostar trip to Paris and in the subsequent holiday in the French xapital, all of Douglas' annoying flaws are on display - his tendency to try to force his own interests on his son, his constant lecturing of Albie for staring at his smartphone, his obsession with stats and ticking off all the main tourist sights with an itinerary. 

Douglas also has a terrible inability and reluctance to embrace spontaneity.

At his wife's beckoning, he tries to cut Albie some slack - even permitting him to skip dinner, only for his son to pick up a busker and take her back to his hotel room.

This brings them into contact the following morning with Thaddea Graham's free spirited Kat, who ridicules Douglas after he lectures her for raiding the breakfast buffet.

The Petersens will come into contact with Kat again in their next destination, Amsterdam where a confrontation during another buffet breakfast between Albie with a group of arrogant businessmen goes disastrously.

Albie and Kat intervene when the businessmen humiliate a waitress and fists start to fly, only for Douglas to apologise for the behaviour of his son describing it as idiotic.

Raging with his father, Albie storms off and leaves Amsterdam with Kat for Venice.

Desperate to fix the mess he has created, Douglas decides to pursue his son while Connie returns to England but can he track down Albie?

And will he be able to mend their strained relationship and also a marriage that looks destined to fall apart?

In addition to the family drama, Nicholls deploys flashbacks to examine the roots of Douglas and Connie's marriage and help us understand why they have dislodged.

Iain de Caestecker and Gina Bramhill play younger versions of Douglas and Connie, whose relationship seems to be based on the old adage that opposites attract.

Douglas, a biochemist whose research involves fruit flies, initially dazzles Connie, an aspiring painter, with his passionate defence of science at a dinner party organised by his sister, Charlotte Spencer's Karen.

Attracted to his intelligence and groundedness, she marries Douglas.

However the couple suffer a huge setback when they lose their baby daughter to sepsis within days of her being born.

They subsequently conceive Albie while escaping on holiday their trauma and as the years roll by, Connie sacrifices her ambitions to be an artist while Douglas moves from research work into the bureaucracy of middle management.

We catch a glimpse of the roots of the friction between Douglas and Albie in a sequence where he angers his young son by insisting on building a Lego space shuttle, dismantling a crude dinosaur that the boy has created instead.

All of these jigsaw pieces shed light on the challenges facing Douglas, Connie and Albie without ever overshadowing the contemporary tale.

Under the steady hand of director Geoffrey Sax, Nicholl, whose acclaimed novels 'Starter for Ten' and 'One Day' were also skilfully adapted for the big screen, delivers a poignant four part Sunday night comedy drama that will strike a chord with middle aged parents and late teens.

Nicholls has always been good at mapping out the human flaws and twists of fate that can trip up relationships and it is to the producers and directors' credit that they have trusted him to craft a screenplay that captures most of the novel's essential elements.

The author does a very effective job translating much of the book's detail to the TV - with only a few backstories missing.

While those elements in the book shed further light on Connie and Douglas's behaviour, they are not indispensable and their jettisoning only serves to underline the wisdom of having Nicholls adapt his only novel.

The miniseries' biggest asset, however, is Hollander.

His performance is so convincing, it will have many middle class dads wincing as they recognise their own failings onscreen.

Fastidious, flailing and highly stressed, Douglas is the architect of a lot of the woes that fall upon him.

However you never doubt for one second from Hollander's performance that his heart is in the right place, that he knows he is very flawed and that he desperately wants to correct things.

It is wonderful to see Reeves back again in a prominent role too and she delivers an understated performance 

Taylor does a good job depicting a frustrated son, trying hard to assert his independence and define his own place in the world.

de Caestecker and Bramhill impress too as the younger versions of Douglas and Connie - capturing the facial ticks and vocal inflections of Hollander and Reeves, while capturing a more exuberant side to the characters.

Belfast actress Thaddea Graham is a vivacious presence as Kat, while fans of the Danish thriller 'The Killing' may be surprised to see its star, Sofie Grabol as a tourist Freya, nursing her own wounds from a broken marriage.

Grabol brings warmth, pathos and a droll wit to the role, as Freya's path crosses with Douglas in Venice.

In bringing his novel to the small screen, Nicholls has had to sacrifice sections set in Florence and Munich so he can compress his plot into four episodes.

But reducing it to a four part miniseries turns out to be a very wise move - ensuring, unlike Andrew Davies' recent six part adaptation of Vikram Seth's 'An Unsuitable Boy' for BBC1, that 'Us' doesn't feel bloated or overstay its welcome.

The bittersweet tone of Nicholls' drama will no doubt register with fans of comedy dramas like ITV's 'Cold Feet'.

But it also seems to have landed on our screens at a perfect moment in time.

While viewers desperately seek escape from a world that has been placed in a straitjacket by Covid, 'Us' delivers hope that one day in the not too distant future we might return to the magnificent banks of the Seine or the charming, cobbled streets of Venice and Amsterdam.

And isn't that a wonderful thought to cling to?

('Us' was broadcast on BBC1 in the UK and Ireland from September 20-October 11, 2020)