While now tragically confirmed, at the time of writing he was still absent, so the show was still watchable. I almost didn’t watch I’m a Celebrity… because of constant rumours of Noel Edmonds’s threatened appearance. Coming on top of a couple of valuable documentaries and the continued urgent morning relevance of Jeremy Vine, it’s quite the rebranding indeed: hats off to someone.
It’s also Channel 5’s first piece of truly new commissioned quality drama. And they don’t come much more brutally controlling than Dunbar, all warm words and warm whiskeys as the local GP, yet a smile which never, ever, quite reaches his eyes. Young writer Sophie Petzal has given us a close, cloying, immensely mature thriller which relies not a twitch on gimmickry nor cartoon violence but very much on the habits which a family, a society, can fall into, when it looks too often the other way, and a reminder that there are many swathes of these islands in which a brutal patriarchy can still hold sway. Does she really have a lifelong history of lying to all, or is that just a clever myth somehow made to stick by Jim over the years of her absence: is she, in fact, being gaslighted? Cat herself (Carolina Main) is splendid, caustic and raging yet with hints of trembling vulnerability, such as in the very opening scene when she has to stop the car to throw up, so wary is she of even setting foot back in the home village.
I won’t spoil too much, as some will want to binge on catch-up – and should, for it’s a class act, claustrophobic and gripping, almost Scandi in its noir – but our antihero Cat’s sister is hiding the fact she has motor neurone disease, her brother hiding the fact that he’s pretty much the only gay in the village, father Jim Hogan (a chilling Adrian Dunbar) hiding the fact that he might have bumped off his wife.
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