JACI STEPHEN: A few niggles – but I’m so glad I’ve kept Faith
Keeping Faith
Tuesday, BBC1
This Way Up
Thursday, Channel 4
Rating: 
Why did Faith (Eve Myles) swap her yellow coat for a blue one? Who has absconded with her sister-in-law and policeman husband? Why has Gael Reardon had a head transplant and taken to speaking like an alien from Mars hearing English for the first time? Who is Faith’s osteopath? Where’s the local locksmith? Now halfway through the second series of Keeping Faith (both series are available on BBC iPlayer), these are just some of the questions that continue to niggle following the return of the lawyer’s missing husband, Evan (Bradley Freegard).
First, the coats. Yellow equalled the past; blue, the present. This much we knew when Faith donned the blue one to visit Evan in jail. So far, so good, apart from when she took to swapping them (let’s hope she doesn’t buy a whole confusing rainbow of coats when the sales come round).
Valleys girl: Eve Myles in Keeping Faith. Eve Myles and Mark Lewis Jones (Steve Baldini) are sublime in a production that looks stunning
Now for sister-in-law Bethan (Mali Harries) and Terry (Matthew Gravelle). Despite her brother having returned, there is not a sign of Bethan in series two – not even so much as a ‘Nice to see you back, bruv’. As for Terry, he’s been completely sidelined in favour of DI Laurence Breeze (Rhashan Stone), on secondment from Scotland Yard.
And so to Gael. Irish actor Angeline Ball played her in series one and has been replaced by Anastasia Hille who, while being a fine performer, manages to make only one word in about every 50 sound remotely Irish. Somebody pass her the Guinness, please. Who knows why the switch occurred, but it hasn’t worked.
The good news, though, is that Faith has finally seen an osteopath. Having spent much of series one lying on her back and drinking beer from a bottle, she is now largely upright, although her house has still not acquired any beer glasses. She has, however, taken to scratching her head a great deal more, so maybe the person who recommended the osteopath could suggest a good nit nurse, too.
Despite having been broken into, Faith still has not thought to put anything other than a basic Yale lock on her front door, although we can be grateful that her doorbell has stopped ringing every five minutes. You could have been forgiven for thinking the percussion section of the London Philharmonic was stalking her.
Niggles aside, Eve Myles and Mark Lewis Jones (Steve Baldini) are sublime in a production that looks stunning. Both actors draw on every nuance of a fine script (Matthew Hall) that is so exquisitely understated that you can be so caught up in the moment you forget this is TV. Every emotion is etched in their faces, the external manifestation of inner struggles that is never less than utterly compelling. These are award-winning performances of the highest calibre; the genius of Amy Wadge’s original music is the cherry on the icing on the cake.
Women are currently enjoying their time in the sun on TV, although of course they have to be oddballs/neurotic and/or mentally unstable to make it onto the airwaves. Sharon Horgan has mastered the art of quick-witted oddballs (Pulling, Catastrophe) and her sense of comic timing and naturalistic delivery make everything she touches turn to gold.
Alas, This Way Up, produced by Horgan’s company Merman, does not deliver anything remotely close to the brilliance that Horgan usually brings to the screen. Co-starring Aisling Bea (who wrote the script), it struggles to find its bearings and decide what it wants to be. Billed as comedy, the first episode registered zero on the laughter front and, having caught up with the rest of it (the series is available on catch up on Channel 4), I’m disappointed that it doesn’t get much better.
Aine (Bea) is a teacher in a foreign-language school, recovering from ‘a teeny little nervous breakdown’, while her sister Shona (Horgan) has a stable home life and a large kitchen (always a sign of success in TV comedy). The problem is that Aine is neither funny enough to be entertaining nor dark enough to be worthy of our empathy. The script is not without merit but Horgan could have sold the dialogue with much greater aplomb than Bea.
The classroom scenes are an embarrassment – straight out of the 1977 sitcom Mind Your Language. It’s inconceivable, in an age of progressive comedy, particularly among women, that this part of the script made it out of the starting gate, let alone past the winning post. This Way Up could do with being turned upside down and given a good pounding. Where’s Faith’s osteopath when you need her?
