Here are a few valuable life lessons to be gathered from the new six-part series Adultery, which is about adultery.<\/p>\n
One, don\u2019t bother.<\/p>\n
Two, if you do bother, don\u2019t do it with the father of your son\u2019s girlfriend or the mother of your daughter\u2019s boyfriend.<\/p>\n
Three, if you do mess around with the father of your son\u2019s girlfriend or the mother of your daughter\u2019s boyfriend, make sure nobody\u2019s got anyone saved in their phone under the moniker \u201cDickhead Dave\u201d. Because he is not going to help matters.<\/p>\n
But Beth (Romola Garai, far too good for this by-the-numbers effort from Danny Brocklehurst) is a bored, beleaguered fortysomething mother of two who has recently lost the personal-trainer business she was passionate about. She is also mourning the loss of her best friend whose husband is facing an assault charge. And Tom (Dominic Cooper, ditto) is a fortysomething father and GP, married to charity fundraiser Hannah (Shelley Conn) who has been struggling with her mental health for a bit. So when Beth comes along, he is helpless before her. They look at each other like two equally stunned halibut, first in a hospital waiting room (they meet when she knocks him off his bike and injures his wrist, the one he uses for foreshadowing), then across a garden party at Tom\u2019s posh home (where Beth \u2013 who I should mention is Lancastrian so, you know, darling \u2013 trails her fingers reverentially across books! About art! On a shelf! And dreams of a life of getting banged on higher thread counts), and then in his GP surgery before Beth launches herself at him and gets the party started.<\/p>\n
Soon they are having sex in cars until Beth remembers her dead best friend kindly left her a house in her will and they could probably prang more comfortably there. Which they do, until disaster strikes! No, that one\u2019s been averted. I hope there isn\u2019t another one coming down the \u2026 Oh! This one\u2019s worse. Dave. Such a dickhead.<\/p>\n
They have to drive to Tom\u2019s cottage in the Lake District instead. \u201cI\u2019m going to scatter my dead friend\u2019s ashes!\u201d Beth tells her family. \u201cI\u2019m going to clear out the rat poo,\u201d Tom tells Hannah. But the urn and bleach go equally unemptied as the pair opt to go at it on a dangerously rickety hall table instead. I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s a neighbour we see disappearing behind a fence at one point or a crew member hiding from the increasing embarrassment of seeing people boggle at a bookshelf because they\u2019ve got Northern accents and deliver lines like \u201cDo you ever worry that our best days are behind us?\u201d and \u201cDepression\u2019s for the middle classes, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the kids are having a much better time, mainly because they still think sex is a novelty and aren\u2019t trying to have it with anyone but each other. Their idea of a thrill is to bunk off school and go to Blackpool for the day. While their adulterous parents get it on in the surgery for the first time, Ollie and Jess are riding the rollercoaster. Diagnosis: metaphor. As the sun sets, Jess celebrates their perfect day: \u201cI don\u2019t want things to ever change!\u201d \u201cThey won\u2019t,\u201d Ollie assures her. Prognosis: terminal.<\/p>\n
Adultery, in short, is a clattering bag of cliches delivered by ciphers, despite a host of good actors giving it everything they can. Everywhere you look there are unconvincing people doing unconvincing things. Yes, you think, Dave may well be a dickhead, but would he really take one look at his ex-wife lying in her coffin in the chapel of rest and say \u201cI\u2019ve been inside that body\u201d to Beth? No. Or, if you were about to swim in an isolated lake in the Lake District on a dirty weekend away, would you do it in a swimming costume and trunks? No. Or, if you were a doctor who\u2019d injured your wrist would you not be able to fashion a sling that actually supports it? Yes. Or, would a neurotic like Hannah, who demands a four-way action plan be forged among the parents when Jess is told off for imitating Ollie by cheeking a teacher, really be unbothered about finding out they take edibles together? No.<\/p>\n
It all adds up to people it is impossible to believe in or care about. The plot is slight. The attempts at class commentary or the problems of mating in middle-aged captivity are like iron rivets being sledgehammered into a balsa wood miniature. There are great central performances, especially from Garai and Conn, and occasional glimpses of what might have been. But like sex on a rickety table in a rat-shat cottage, Adultery remains hardly worth the effort.<\/p>\n
Adultery is on ITVX now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here are a few valuable life lessons to be gathered from the new six-part series Adultery, which is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-657061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}