In the Club
BBC One
★★★☆☆
Chasing Dad: A Lifelong Addiction
BBC One
★★★★☆
Katherine Parkinson’s Kim, the anything but omniscient narrator of the drama In the Club, has terrible blogorrhoea. To bring us up to speed with her life and those of the other women in her maternity group since series one, she blogged a stream of consciousness about her woes read against a montage of scenes of early parental struggle set in the half-light of sleep deprivation.
The blog has no literary merit. Kim says she cannot see why anyone in “their right mind” would have another baby; they must either be “insane” (see also “in their right mind”) or have chronic amnesia. Yet the BBC was fully in possession of its faculties when it commissioned another season of In the Club and Kay Mellor in hers when she decided not to reboot with a fresh set of expectant mothers. With only a marginal infusion of new blood, we are back in the lives of socially downward Roanna, schoolgirl Rosie, done-unto Jasmin and prisoner’s wife Diane.
You see some plots coming a hospital corridor off. The mum of the awful girl acting as well-rewarded surrogate is assuredly going to end up adopting the premmy she found in the loo. Rosie, pregnant again, was never going to find herself in a broken lift without her waters breaking. Other plots stretch credibility. Would any mother leave their teenage daughter, soon to be a two-time parent, homeless to go “travelling” with her new girlfriend? The acting is easy viewing, exacerbated by the brash northern female stereotypes. Only Lorraine Cheshire in a small role as the goggly-specced midwife Geraldine looks real to me.
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No one, despite the slot, need mistake this for The A Word, but Mellor writes moments of emotional truth that are truly illuminating. One came last night when Kim realised why she was shutting her new partner out of her sex life. It was guilt at betraying her ex, Susie. Once she knew Susie had found someone else and experienced a reciprocal (if illogical) betrayal, her libido flooded back. In the Club may not be gilt-edged drama but it understands the human psychology well enough to be tellingly a guilt-edged one.
Chasing Dad: A Lifelong Addiction was a study of the other side of parenting: absent, irresponsible and male. It was a fearless documentary by a young man called Phillip Wood who pointed his camera at his heroin-addicted father. Phillip Sr performed a masterclass in lying: the faux-hurt denial; the exact but invented detail; the calculated distraction. He was not off heroin. He was renting out his council flat. In fact, as his addict-girlfriend explained later, it was being used for every drug-related crime but prostitution.
Then, just as you wrote Wood off, rehab intervened and appeared to work. I doubt if it would have without his son first telling him — and the world — the kind of parent he had been. Chasing his father was not Wood Jr’s addiction: understandably, he had spent his childhood running away. He caught his dad here, however, and the final shot in the mirror of the film-maker bearing his equipment bore the lonely nobility of a sad, bloodied yet victorious warrior.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk