Come Home review: Christopher Ecclestone is reliably great in this family mystery on BBC One

Plus, The Great Celebrity Bake Off
BBC/Red Productions Limited/Steffan Hill
Alistair McKay27 March 2018

Did Danny Brocklehurst watch The Affair before he dreamed up Come Home? The comparison may not be obvious. The Affair was all about attractive people doing unpleasant things in a tempting American environment. True, it had drug-dealing hillbillies, but the central point was the descent of a middle-class writer into a hell of his own design. Or so it seemed.

What the show was actually about was the unreliability of truth. The drama played around with time. It presented events from different perspectives, the better to explain the self-destructive behaviour.

Episode one of Come Home has none of the sunny allure of The Affair. As you’d expect from a writer who graduated from Shameless and maintains an affinity for the vernacular humanity of Alan Bleasdale, it is rooted in unglamorous domesticity. Greg (Christopher Eccleston) is a single father who runs a garage in Belfast.

The odd thing — the dramatic thing — is that Greg’s wife abandoned him after 19 years without asking for custody of the kids. She just walked out. At least, that’s what Greg says when he tries to explain his predicament to an unimpressed date in a pub. “And now you’re thinking,” Greg continues, “what’s up with him? What could drive a woman to walk out on her own family — her own home?”

Eccleston’s Greg isn’t a million miles from his portrayal of Maurice in The A Word — at first, anyway. He’s slightly less backward at coming forward and soon manages a bunk up with Brenna (Kerri Quinn), who delivers rolls to the garage at lunchtime. Her husband is a nutter. A violent nutter.

And Brenna? Well, she’s not what she seems, is she? She’s good at the sex but that bit where she suggests to Greg’s kids that they might like to loosen up and try a bit of E or ketamine? Awkward. But then again, the sex.

Episode two comes more from the perspective of the absent wife, Marie (Paula Malcomson) who is admirably restrained when she discovers Greg in her house sniffing her knickers. What could drive a woman to walk out on her family? We may yet find out. Eccleston is reliably great, and his character’s way of coping with the confusion is to get up in the night and listen to Pale Blue Eyes by The Velvet Underground, so he deserves a bit of understanding.

Channel 4

In episode four of The Great Celebrity Bake Off, the great celebrities include Joe Lycett, who is a comedian, Melanie Sykes, who is a TV and radio presenter, Lee Mack, who is the star of Not Going Out, and Griff Rhys Jones, who used to be Griff Rhys Jones but has now grown a satanic jazz beard.

The great celebrities make blondies, which are equal-opportunity brownies. Everything goes as you’d expect. All the hosts have their shirts untucked, the better to hide their cake-waists, Paul Hollywood cuts his fruit turnover open with a knife and fork, which is rather lah-di-dah, and then reveals that despite going to art school, he has never heard of Frida Kahlo.

Melanie has, and decides to make a cake in the shape of Kahlo’s head, with chilli chocolate sponge and tequila buttercream. And, says the voiceover, “to reflect Frida’s creative side, Melanie’s hiding chocolate sweets in the centre”. It’s what Frida would have wanted.

@AHMcKay

Come Home airs Tuesday, March 27 at 9pm on BBC One and The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer airs on the same date at 8pm on Channel 4.

Pick of the day

Divorce

The first series of this Sarah Jessica Parker comedy drama was admirably dark and seemed like a bold venture for the Sex and the City star.

The second is considerably lighter, which is not surprising as the series is now run by SATC alumna Jenny Bicks, who brought several of the show’s writers with her.

But it’s still a show about divorce, so there is room for emotional shading, and the flickering chemistry between Frances (Parker) and her ex, Robert (Thomas Haden Church), feels true to life.

Robert is like a bear emerging from hibernation, his charisma unleashed by the removal of his moustache. And now he has a girlfriend — Jackie (played by Ugly Betty’s Becki Newton) — who looks like a more tolerant,

box-fresh version of his ex-wife. There are limits to tolerance, of course, and when Jackie encourages Robert to play his Yes records loudly she is surely going too far.

It’s a bittersweet episode for Frances, who finds herself feeling excluded from her own family. Meanwhile, uptown...

Sky Atlantic, 10.10pm

New TV shows to look forward to in 2018

1/17

Screen Time

One Strange Rock

Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky’s love letter to the wonders of earth science has eight things going for it, all of them astronauts. Actually, that’s unfair, as the visuals are quite astonishing (though the small print admits they may have been“graphically enhanced”), and narrator Will Smith keeps things accessible enough for the kids at the back of the class.

But it’s the open-eyed awe of the astronauts that brings the science to life. Chris Hadfield — who sang Space Oddity on the International Space Station — is particularly persuasive, comparing the Earth’s oxygen to the vibrations of a guitar string.

National Geographic, 8pm

Saturn 3

First, the good news — the Earth still exists in the future. The bad news is that food is in short supply, so top scientists Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett are stationed in orbit around Saturn devising new crops to feed the population. Which is hard enough — even harder with a killer robot on the loose.

London Live, 10pm

Kate Adie’s Women of World War One

The story of goal-scoring sensation Bella Reay of Blyth Spartans Munitions Girls, who would play in front of crowds of 20,000, is one of the many exposed by Kate Adie in this history of how British women were assimilated into an unreceptive society.

These women were usually spectators themselves but the arrival of war hastened changes that suffragettes such as Evelina Haverfield had long been campaigning for.

Attitudes, this film details, have barely changed. The women working in the munitions factories were decried by the papers for enjoying nights out; these women inhaled such toxic chemicals that their unborn children’s skin turned yellow.

London Live, 8pm

Catch Up

The Bridge

More news on Saga Norén and The Bridge. Series four of the peerless Scandi noir, starring Sofia Helin, below, as the overly logical leather-trousered cop, has now been pencilled in for broadcast on BBC Two in May. In the meantime, the first three series have just been released on the BBC iPlayer.

BBC iPlayer

Set the box

Arena: Bob Dylan — Trouble No More

An Easter treat for Bob Dylan fans. Arena has made a documentary on his Born Again period. Ever the enigma, Dylan suggested 1980 live footage be linked by sermons. Luc Sante was commissioned to write them, Michael Shannon plays the preacher, and Jennifer LeBeau directs.

BBC Four, Good Friday, 10pm

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT