Sticks And Stones
Monday-Wednesday, ITV
Responsible Child
Monday, BBC2
Rating: 
Sticks And Stones is the latest drama from Mike Doctor Foster Bartlett, who also, less successfully, wrote Trauma and Press. This time out it’s a ‘psychological thriller’, whereby somebody is conspired against and their nicely comfortable life is dismantled bit by bit until it becomes a waking nightmare.
It was the same deal with, for example, The Replacement (my favourite) and Cheat (so-so). This was a painful watch – I hate seeing a life eviscerated, personally – but it was so laid on with a trowel, if not several trowels, and maybe all the trowels there have ever been, that it became merely ridiculous. One choice moment occurred when that smart restaurant did not say to Thomas: ‘Good evening, sir. You do realise you’re an hour early?’ Then again, the plot would have fallen apart if it had.
Ken Nwosu in Sticks And Stones. This was beset with plot contrivances that were improbable to say the least
Thomas (Ken Nwosu) works for Clayton Office Solutions as a salesperson. It’s housed on a Reading industrial estate, which doesn’t make it the most exciting setting, but I was just pleased the main character wasn’t an architect. For once. Thomas sleeps with a book called Millionaire By 40 by his bed, which you are not meant to hold against him, even if it’s hard. But he faces the world with positivity and a smile and has a lovely home and lovely wife (yes, a nurse) and lovely young daughter who happens to be deaf. However, during a presentation for an important prospective client, something goes wrong. He panics and faints, and he and his small team lose their bonus.
His team – Andy (Sean Sagar), Becky (Ritu Arya), Isobel (Susannah Fielding) – then turn cold. Or is he imagining it? It starts with mocking Post-its, but ‘you need to get a sense of humour’, he is told. Interactions are laced with tiny bits of malice. Or are we imagining that? ‘What did your mother do?’, one of the team might ask, and it just feels off by one small nudge of the dial. Is Thomas paranoid, or is this really happening? We don’t know. We’re being gaslit ourselves. Interesting.
But once it becomes apparent, quite early on, that Thomas is being conspired against, it stops being in any way subtle and, instead escalates into full-throttle nastiness. In fact, every human being Thomas encounters from then on is a terrible human being. His boss (Ben Miller) is terrible. Even his GP’s receptionist is terrible. True, Isobel seems to be on his side? But is she? (‘Don’t trust her,’ I wanted to shout at Thomas, who could be just so hapless. And thick.)
This was beset with plot contrivances that were improbable to say the least, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any madder, Thomas’s car is towed and he has to chase it down in his pyjamas, for instance. (Could we call that ‘a trowel moment’?) Come the end there was a satisfying twist, but ultimately this was a standard melodrama that stretched credulity and stretched credulity and stretched credulity… until it snapped.
Responsible Child was as harrowing as you thought it would be. A one-off drama by Sean Buckley and based on a real case, here we had 12-year-old Ray (Billy Barratt) who, together with his brother Nathan (James Tarpey), 23, had killed their stepfather, inflicting more than 70 stab wounds.
Just as you thought it couldn’t get madder, his car is towed and he has to chase it in his pyjamas
This was told through Ray’s eyes as he was about to be tried in the adult court. This is because the age of criminal responsibility is ten, even if, as his solicitor pointed out, you can’t buy a hamster until you are 16. Ray looks angelic. ‘You’d think the boy had fallen from a cloud,’ his solicitor also pointed out, ‘but the murder is as brutal as I have ever seen.’ What happened to Ray? Why has he done this terrible thing? The cop series Sinner recently featured a killer child, and as the detective said there: ‘Kids don’t murder out of the blue.’
Through flashbacks we saw how abusive Ray’s stepfather Scott (Shaun Dingwall) had been and how social services allowed him to return to the family home even after he’d been charged with attempted murder of Nathan. (Oh God, the axe. At 11 minutes in. But the charge was then dropped.) Their mother (Debbie Honeywood), who was somehow broken, spent days in bed and could not stand up to Scott.
Michelle Fairley and Billy Barratt in Responsible Child. It was as harrowing as you thought it would be
Barratt’s performance was superb. He had a blank stare but, still, you understood the pain he was in and all the emotional turmoil roiling underneath. And as Ray faced the pre-trial, the actual trial and the sentencing, you were forced to consider if this is right. Or, as his barrister told him: ‘If you were a 30-year-old man with a mind your age you would be judged not fit for trial.’ The final moment, with his mother, was truly heartbreaking.
If there was a negative it was only this: could we have not learned a bit more about the brother Nathan? But it was powerful and made you think, and no one had to chase down a car in their pyjamas. So it had that going for it, too.