Finding Alice
ITV, Sunday
It’s A Sin
Channel 4, Friday
Rating: 
The opening episode of Finding Alice began with Alice (Keeley Hawes) being shown around her new home. That is, the multi-million-pound ‘smart’ house her husband Harry (Jason Merrells) has designed and built, although why she has never seen it before, not even while it was in progress, I don’t know.
What did they talk about in the evenings? Anyway, on their first night, tragedy, when he’s found dead at the bottom of their (banister-less) stairs. Did he slip? Was he pushed?
After watching this episode I did later think, perhaps meanly: ‘Maybe he read the rest of the script and jumped? I would have.’ Yes, mean. But it does make total sense.
The opening episode of Finding Alice began with Alice (Keeley Hawes, above) being shown around her new home
I’m not sure if this is comedy, thriller or drama, and the problem is: does it know what it is? Certainly, it never settles in tone and, consequently, it just keeps jarring. It’s intended, I think, as a ‘darkly witty’ take on grief and loss and discovering your newly deceased spouse was hiding all manner of secrets (oh, that), but the script was such that everyone simply came over as gratingly annoying and unpleasant.
Alice is unpleasant to the bank and is unpleasant to the sexy mortuary guy and unpleasant to the police. We know Hawes is a tremendous actress but she cannot save this, as can’t Joanna Lumley, who plays Alice’s mother.
‘What are you wearing?’ are her first words to Alice after Harry’s death. Followed, more or less, by: ‘You’ll find someone else.’ This is co-written by Simon Nye, who also penned Men Behaving Badly and The Durrells, but what should be comedy gold isn’t.
It may be because none of the characters feels at all real.
There were running jokes to do with the ‘smart’ curtains Alice can’t work, and the fridge she can’t find, but nothing sufficiently funny to distract from our bafflement. We’re meant to be baffled by some of what is going on – why was Harry’s office ransacked?
What was he doing at a sperm bank? Why is Alice so reluctant to hand over the CCTV to the police? But I was most baffled by what I wasn’t meant to be baffled about. For instance, why doesn’t Alice take proper care of her daughter?
Why do Harry’s parents (played by Gemma Jones and Kenneth Cranham) seem barely bereaved? But, of course, the biggest question is: what did happen to Harry that night?
I have my own theory. Did I say?
This week Hawes also appeared in It’s A Sin, which is different from Finding Alice, although it’s hard to put my finger on why. Because it rings true and is an absolute knockout, perhaps?
This is written by Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who, Queer As Folk, A Very English Scandal), based on his own experiences, and is about three gay men – they’re 18 or thereabouts – coming to London in 1981.
There’s exuberant Ritchie (Olly Alexander, terrific) from the Isle of Wight, who will meet up with Roscoe (Omari Douglas, ditto), who has fled his deeply homophobic Nigerian family (I clapped when he left, such a brilliant scene) and shy Colin (Callum Scott Howells, ditto again) from South Wales, whose landlady points out the jotter by the telephone in the hall and asks him to note down any calls he might make, ‘especially after 6pm’.
That is so 1981. This is so true.
There’s the scene featuring Ritchie’s parents (played by Shaun Dooley and Hawes, above), which perfectly captures the racism of the time
For the first times in their lives, these young men don’t have to hide and can be who they are. And this captures how exciting and thrilling that must have been.
There are parties and hook-ups and it’s steamy, even if Colin has yet to remove his anorak. He does have some catching up to do. It is one excellent scene after another. There’s the scene featuring Ritchie’s parents (played by Shaun Dooley and Hawes), which perfectly captures the racism of the time.
‘But where are you from originally?’ they ask Ritchie’s new, mixed-heritage friend when she tells them she’s from Woking. And that scene with Colin’s boss? Will you ever be able to get ‘clean it, clean it again, clean it, clean it again…’ out of your head?
But Aids is on the horizon. A weird goth woman at a party says she’s heard the news from America ‘about a flu that only affects gay men’, but Ritchie tells her to stop being so stupid, as you would.
Denial is always the first line of defence. (See also: Covid-19.) But Colin has a lovely colleague, Henry (played by the always wonderful Neil Patrick Harris), whose long-standing partner is ill.
‘First they said it was pneumonia,’ says Henry, ‘then they said it was psittacosis.’ ‘Is that from parrots? You haven’t got a parrot, have you?’ queries Colin.
Then Henry becomes ill and you will be reminded of the way people with Aids were once treated by the medical establishment, which is shocking. And heart-breaking. There will be more heartbreak to come, I’m sure, but this is all so well told.
If you’ve only time for one Keeley Hawes drama this week, I think you know which way to go.