‘Lord almighty!” a middle-aged Welsh woman says in the first episode of Michael Sheen’s steelworks drama The Way (BBC1, Mon). “Isn’t the deal meant to be that we’re hit with just one crisis per generation? Like a war, or a crash, or a pandemic? My daughter … she’s had one of each!”
Now I hate to be pedantic, but I’m not sure that one crisis per generation ever was the deal, cosmologically speaking. “Sorry,” the Great Fire of London didn’t say to the Bubonic Plague. “I’ll just let you finish up.”
Still, you can see the point she is trying to make. Climate emergency, AI apocalypse, far-right lurch: it is a bit crisisy out there, isn’t it? It’s not hard to see why an ambitious TV writer might feel an urge — a calling, even — to try to make sense of a world that seems to be spinning out of control.
Just look at the TV schedules this week as The Way went head to head with ITV’s medical drama Breathtaking, which offered the delightful prospect of reminding everyone just how bleak the Covid-19 crisis was.
The Way is centred on the Port Talbot steelworks, which is so crisis-ridden there’s literally a crisis there right now. But such hyper-topicality is double-edged. For viewers actually living through this stuff you can see why, say, dogs getting cute haircuts on Instagram might be more enticing.
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Still, this three-part series about a workers’ uprising has a dream team feel. It’s Sheen’s directorial debut (he also stars as the ghost of a coalminer). The script comes from James “State of the Nation” Graham, and the maverick documentary maker Adam Curtis completes what Sheen has described as an “Avengers assemble” line-up.
The Way makes much of Port Talbot’s dramatic skyline, as well as its status as a last bastion of industrial power. We have steelworkers falling into vats of molten slag, foreign owners indifferent to local communities, smatterings of Welsh folklore, and the rather good line “The British don’t revolt, they grumble”. Curtis’s influence is immediately apparent in the ominous electronic soundtrack, the flickery archive footage and a sinister pouting penguin that on closer inspection appears to be a bin. Perhaps the most Adam Curtis bin ever.
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At its centre is the Driscoll family, estranged parents and warring adult kids who find themselves pursued by the British Army through Afan Forest Park, having become accidental revolutionaries. It might be the volume of drugs ingested by Owen Driscoll (Callum Scott Howells), but things escalate fast. The mood shifts from portentous to hysterical to OK this is really quite silly now. The result is Gavin & Stacey meets The Road: a misfit family of Welsh fugitives on the run in a hostile England where suddenly — inexplicably — the merest hint of a Welsh accent is enough to have you lynched by private security forces. I don’t know, I missed Uncle Bryn.
We’re supposed to find the family endearing, maybe even amusing, but honestly there were more laughs in Curtis’s seven-hour dissection of the fall of the Soviet Union. Overall it reminded me of children’s TV dramas from the 1980s. Was it the archival footage? The ancient sword? Or maybe just the hammy crowd scenes? It’s a strange project for Sheen, Graham and Curtis, who have all excelled at verbatim dramas or documentaries that hew close to the facts. The best thing that I can say about The Way is that it’s reassuring that something this eccentric can still make it to screen. Better a mad human mess than more algorithmic mush.
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Breathtaking (ITV1, Mon-Wed) seemed a grimmer prospect. We’ve had Covid. We’ve had long Covid. We’ve had the Covid inquiry. Who wants to relive all that? Not me, I thought, but honestly — watch it. Just watch it. It is everything The Way is not: precise, controlled, enraging and moving and, despite its smaller focus — a dozen doctors and nurses in one hospital over three timeframes — opens out into something much larger. It is based on Rachel Clarke’s memoir of her experiences as an NHS consultant and the two other writers, Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, both have medical training, which lends it palpable realism. The camerawork is kinetic, following an acute medicine consultant, Abbey (Joanne Froggatt), as she makes her rounds, with sudden lurches that capture the way a doctor’s attention is constantly pulled from life to death and to life again.
It’s powerful because it’s restrained. There’s no need to dwell on Abbey’s reaction when she is told she might like to buy her own respirator for £300 on Amazon. Or her swerving six feet to avoid a potentially infectious passer-by. The details play on our collective memory: the iPad farewells; the medics’ red raw skin from wearing masks all day; the ventilators slowly lowered into mouths. A scene in which Abbey’s team watch their colleague’s funeral on screen, each standing in socially distanced boxes, moved me to tears. To be honest I barely stopped crying.
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Frogatt as Abbey, quietly punch-drunk with stress, is mesmerising. But the cast is uniformly excellent. It is shaping up to be a stellar year for ITV’s drama department, following Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has changed the national conversation — and there’s a common thread between the two. The medics realise quickly that there is a chronic shortage of PPE, then that a situation is developing in care homes and, eventually, that misinformation about empty hospitals is spreading over the internet. Again and again they are ignored by managers who insist they are following “national guidance”, that cursed refrain. Once again we have monolithic top-down leadership disregarding the experiences of people on the front line.
Ultimately, though, Breathtaking soars above politics. It’s really about love. The three episodes manage to distil an enormous range of human relationships into small exchanges and gestures, and what lingers is the effort of the medics to bear witness to these final farewells. It reminds us that there really is a society. A tough watch, but one that deserves to win all the awards
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Which leads us to The Baftas (BBC1, Sun). By strange coincidence last week’s award ceremony was also overshadowed by a Michael Sheen joke that overstayed its welcome. The show’s opening skit was an excruciatingly long prerecorded bit in which this year’s presenter, David Tennant, tried to wriggle out of dog-sitting Sheen’s pup, Bark Ruffalo. Little wonder a bemused Claire Foy described the event as “very LA”.
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After an awkward start, Tennant emerged with his dignity almost intact. Hugh Grant performed some comical rhymes as an Oompa-Loompa, which was marginally better than his default setting of Bridget Jones quips. Ryan Gosling winked at Emma Stone, although was there anyone Gosling was not winking at?
The best moment of the night was the mighty Samantha Morton accepting a Bafta fellowship. I could have happily watched another half-hour of her best screen moments. Otherwise, Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed had it about right: “It is a long night … feels longer, dun’t it? Feels longer!”
Camilla Long is away
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