This is not the end

What do you get if you cross last year’s Single Father with an ITV multi-part drama? Some darn good acting, a massively convincing bereavement and a growing suspicion that all is not as it seems. Is anything ever as it seems on ITV? Are cops ever anything except shouty or blind to the real truths dug out at great personal peril by civilians? It seems that with the disappearance of The Bill we also lost a wide variety of police type characters, but that’s by the by. Without You is here and it’s mixing mourning with investigation, isolation and concern to make something shaping up to be really rather intriguing.

Here’s the lowdown: Anna Friel and Marc Warren are happily married, been together for 12 years and currently trying for a kid. He’s an accountant and she’s a nursery school teacher and they have a really lovely house that, although needing some work, would be way out of their price range if it was down here, but again I digress. They’re in Manchester and I haven’t a Scooby how much Victorian houses cost in that neck of the woods. Anyway, pretty early on (so I’m not spoiling anything here) he dies in a car crash with an unknown female passenger next to him, implying all that had at first appeared rosy was actually less so in his mind. First big question: was he having an affair?

“They’re in Manchester and I haven’t a Scooby how much houses cost in that neck of the woods”

The acting is superb. Does Anna Friel want there to be something more suspicious about their deaths in order to keep her own memory of their relationship pure? Is the dead woman’s husband acting bizarrely or is it simply you cannot expect all marriages to be the same? Does it make a difference that Anna Friel’s parents are both long dead and she doesn’t feel especially close to Marc Warren’s folks, so adding to her isolation? Should I probably use the characters’ names rather than the actors’?

Based on the bestselling novel What To Do When Someone Dies by Nicci French, it’s gratifying to see a collection of characters all quite diverse, offering their own form of support that together make up a mismatched patchwork of a hammock to try and replace the constant warmth and assurance gone with the dead husband. The only slightly annoying thing is the pat platitudes uttered by Marc Warren from beyond the grave. However, contrasting with everyone else’s regular dialogue it does acknowledge with its very blandness that these are simply words a mourning soul is demanding to hear, rather than suggesting any actual supernatural competent to the story.

Anna Friel – gotta love her from Brookside to Pushing Up Daisies. Marc Warren – enchanting from The Hustle to Doctor Who and beyond. Put them together with an already proven story and I’m curious as to what will develop. Already intriguing, I’m hoping it will become must-see. It’s just got to live up to all that potential then.

Without You, ITV1, Thursday 8 December 2011