TV review: The Street | Future of Food

Published on Monday 17 August 2009 22:57

The Street BBC1 Future Of Food BBC2

IT'S A standing joke that no-one in real life would want to move to Albert Square or Coronation Street, where within weeks you are virtually certain to become involved in murder, adultery or kidnapping. Yet would you want to move into The Street of Jimmy McGovern's drama either?

Sure, your neighbours would all be the country's finest acting talents and the dialogue would be well crafted – not for you endless time-filling banter about Betty's hotpot. But the lives of its characters are even more miserable – in this current series, we've had Anna Friel as a single mother forced into prostitution; Bob Hoskins as a publican threatened by a gangster; Jonas Armstrong as a wounded and traumatised soldier; Joseph Mawle as an angry racist chef and Stephen Graham as an alcoholic discovering his long-lost son has Down's syndrome. Not all of them ended unhappily, but these are hardly feel-good stories.

So it was no surprise that Eddie – the series' longest running character, who has popped into most of the stories – had a less than joyful time in this episode. Timothy Spall's Eddie is a crumpled, infuriating man, so hapless he literally can't say no when his co-worker at the taxi firm chats him up.

She was "plain, lonely, a bit sad" and played by Ruth Jones, who sadly seems to be always cast in these roles (except, mind you, in Gavin And Stacey which, not uncoincidentally, she writes herself). She is very good at it though: when a cab driver who has flirted with her over the com system comes into the office, her face automatically tightens in anticipation of his inevitable, barely hidden disappointment at seeing her in person.

Eddie is so useless that his half-hearted affair is immediately revealed to his wife, to whom he bleats: "I only did it because I hadn't got the heart not to." And he's so ineffectual that he tentatively hovers outside the ladies' toilet while the wife dies inside of an anger-induced asthma attack. It ended with a funeral at which he sobbed out his love for her, delivered as movingly as perhaps only Timothy Spall could.

We have reviewed a lot of episodes of The Street here, partly because it's generally very good, but also because when drama is being penny-pinched out of the schedules, it has become virtually the last hold-out of the single play tradition which goes back to the venerated Play For Today. And so, despite its mournful themes, it's a shame that this was its final episode, as McGovern has decided to end it after cuts at ITV Studios, where it was made.

Glossy, daffy nonsense like Desperate Romantics or Mistresses, or the occasional, much-trumpeted but low-budgeted short series like Occupation or The Devil's Whore, or the formulaic likes of hospital and detective shows: this is what British drama has come down to, which is one of the saddest stories of all.

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