True Love

I don't tend to write about TV, but True Love is one of the finest pieces of British television of recent years and I want to spread the word.

It is a really classy, bold, unusual take on a familiar subject, both more cinematic and more literary than one might expect from a BBC One drama (though it is produced by hallowed film production company Working Title). Over five episodes, True Love focuses on five characters in seaside town Margate and the love-dilemmas that develop around them: David Tennant is happily married to nice Anna from Downton Abbey, until an old flame pops up; Ashley Walters is fed up with the sexless monotony of parenthood and embarks on an affair with a pretty stranger he spots at a bus stop; lonely English teacher Billie Piper develops an intense friendship with female pupil Karen (Kaya Scodelario from Skins), a rare ray of sunshine in a tough school; Jane Horrocks, stuck in a lifeless marriage, befriends a mysterious customer at her shop; and David Morrissey meets the perfect woman online, much to his daughter's disgust and an unexpected admirer's dismay.

I imagine a show like this is an actor's dream. Writer-director Dominic Savage encourages improvisation (he worked wonders with Colin Firth and Robert Carlyle in Born Equal), and here he elicits exceptionally deft, naturalistic performances. True Love is full of lovely nuances and achingly believable representations of relationships that have lost their spark (listless conversations in restaurants, kitchens, beds...), but there are a couple of scenes that rank amongst the best television acting I've seen. The first is the moment David Tennant tells his friend from work he's not sure he can stay away from his ex-girlfriend: the second is when David Morrissey, an actor I could watch all day, is confronted with a false accusation, one that could destroy a relationship for which he’s waited his whole life, and he defends his innocence with heartbreaking, animalistic urgency.

The structure and shifting perspective of the characterisation is ingenious (and much subtler than the likes of Crash), as the characters from each of the five episodes interlock and recur throughout the series: as in Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad, a character briefly introduced early on often reappears in rather a different light. For instance, Kaya Scodelario's Karen is a mature, gentle, artistically curious companion to her teacher Billie Piper in Episode Three, but a stroppy, unsympathetic cow with her dad (David Morrissey) in Episode Five. Billie Piper's bit-on-the-side (Charlie Creed Miles) goes from priapic indifference in Episode Three to something rather more vulnerable when we learn in Episode Four that his own wife is cheating on him. Karen is betrayed by her friend Lorraine, whom we glimpse very briefly as David Tennant's daughter in the first episode, but we see a very different side to Lorraine in the final one. Each episode is brought to a satisfying, authentic end, too, and they are refreshingly difficult to predict (the restraint of the David Tennant and Ashley Walters episodes is particularly impressive). The pathos is enriched by a rather interesting selection of music, though it is more effective when used sparingly. Roberta Flack's 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' is timed perfectly in the David Tennant episode, but the Mumford and Sons album is flogged within an inch of its life in the Jane Horrocks one.

This is masterful television. It combines some of the poetic, modern, gold-in-the-mud realism of Andrea Arnold with the understated, non-judgmental, elliptical characterisation of Alice Munro or Raymond Carver. Most importantly, it illustrates the intoxicating sense of abandon when a relationship is exciting and the strange, guilty languor when it isn't. Please watch all five episodes of True Love: they're only half an hour each and they whistle by.