Ordinary Lies: Tuesday, BBC One
Arena: The Roundhouse
– The People’s Palace: Sunday, BBC Four
Now
in its second year, the excellent anthology series Ordinary Lies succeeds in its mission to covertly smuggle
standalone dramas into the primetime schedules.
Although
linked by overlapping storylines and a shared workplace setting – this year
it’s a Welsh call centre and warehouse – each episode focuses on a different
character. Much like The Street by Jimmy
McGovern, it’s essentially a series of self-contained plays.
Writer
Danny Brocklehurst, who’s worked with McGovern, has inherited the master’s
cruel penchant for plunging his characters into painful moral dilemmas. They’re
like a pair of vengeful Gods.
The
overarching theme of the series is the costly repercussion of deceit. People
lie for many reasons, and not always with the intent of deliberately hurting
others. Each week the tension arises from when and how the protagonist will be
found out.
Brocklehurst’s
latest unfortunate plaything was Holly, the company’s highly capable PA. Bored
of life and nursing a broken heart, Holly had lost all confidence in herself.
Her fragile ego took a further battering when she accidentally discovered a
note in which her boyfriend apparently listed his problems with her (the
eventual twist that this was in fact a list of his own perceived failings was
hardly surprising).
This
spurred her into inevitably doomed action. Using social media, she decided to
track down the ex who shattered her sense of security, in a desperate bid to
reinvent herself. This involved the theft of glamorous images from her FaceBook
friends, and an elaborate ruse in which she posed as the successful manager of
her own company. Suitably impressed, he swiftly ended up in bed with her.
However,
it turned out he wasn’t being truthful either. Not only had he cheated on her
years ago, he’d also fathered a child with his mistress. This quagmire of
deceit was compounded by the revelation that, when he left her, Holly was
pregnant with his child.
The
scene in which this information tumbled forth was suitably gut-wrenching;
hitherto best known for comedy roles in the likes of Fresh Meat, Kimberley Nixon as Holly more than proved her worth as
a dramatic actress.
This
was a sad, cautionary study of the devastating effects of heartbreak and the
ways in which social media can make users feel inferior by presenting a
distortedly rosy image of other people’s lives. It’s all too easy to present a
manufactured front to the world from behind your laptop.
And
yet Brocklehurst couldn’t quite bring himself to destroy Holly completely. The
episode appeared to be a lesson in the futility of trying to rekindle a dead
romance, but she received a glimmer of hope in the final scene.
Even
vengeful Gods have their moments of leniency.
Britain’s
most beloved Victorian engine shed was the star of Arena: The Roundhouse – The People’s Palace, which paid tribute to
a legendary London venue steeped in weird-beard history.
Once
the home of experimental theatre and underground ‘60s happenings from the likes
of Pink Floyd, today The Roundhouse is basically a corporate music and arts
centre. So no wonder this typically well-researched documentary focused on its
reign as a radical portal for punks, hippies, beat poets, black power activists
and, err, Barbara Windsor.
Call
me a romantic old dreamer if you will, brothers and sisters, but contemporary
culture is nowhere near as interesting as it was in the wild heyday of The
Roundhouse. The party is over.
