Heating up

I t’s funny how the brightest and most intense of times can be the most awe-inspiring when experienced, and yet really quite silly when observed it retrospect. I’m saying this having just watched the first episode out of a total of six of a new drama series called White Heat, kicking off in 1965 with a group of desperate students sharing a house together. From privileged and not so much, from a time of full university grants, post-war opportunities, the introduction of the Pill and all that resonated from that politically. Essentially leaving home wide eyed to sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. No matter how sheltered you were, if you’re over 25 you’ve probably experienced this for yourself, and thought that your generation were the first to do it, and if you’re under 60 romanticised the 1960s to the nth degree as the source of it all. Here lieth the origins of teenagers, behaving badly and rebelling against the ideas of your parents. Right.

This is rather good, that being said. Initially my response was indulgent towards it. As one of the housemates mentions at their first dinner together; they are assembled pretty much as a social experiment bringing together Victor (Jamaican medical student), Lily (northern free-spirited art student), Charlotte (middle class home counties English student), and the other equally different representatives. It’s as if dashing young landlord, Jack, has decided he doesn’t want to have any swappsies for the school yard with his collection of tenants. None of these are the same in his mind, which for all of his claims of liberation and equality has already pigeon-holed them all into boxes he wanted to fill. Despite his arrogance he’s as lost as the rest of them, and yet still manages to epitomise that ‘distressed’ and ‘lonely’ soul – who usually carries a guitar around in many contemporary parallels – who all the girls think they might like to ‘save’.

This was the point when I realised I might have become a ‘grown-up’.

“Thinking back I can recall the heady mix of thrill and fear at leaving home for the first time.”

I can also remember my grandmother, who lived a remarkable life before, during and after WWII, telling me in a very off-hand manner that each generation thinks they’re the ones to invent sex and drugs. I was quite shocked at the time. Now I can readily believe it as I smile indulgently as this lot. Who am I to condescend?

White Heat is told in retrospect, as it is framed by an older Charlotte brought back to the house they once shared by the death of a mystery someone. Lily arrives too and the impression is given they are all to return to go through what remains of the worldly possessions of the final occupant. With a cast that includes Juliet Stevenson, Lindsay Duncan, Ramon Tikaram and Hugh Quarshie in the present-day ensemble, Jeremy Northam, Tamsin Greig and a smorgasbord of talented young things (including Upstairs, Downstairs Claire Foy as Charlotte) in the ‘60s, it promises well. The fact it can remind me of a bygone era in my own history (not the ‘60s, but obviously my decade was equally guilty of inventing ‘growing up’) intrigues me as to what delights the following episodes will remind me of.

White Heat, BBC2, Thursday 8 March