Gone<\/a> is not: a sitcom, a musical, a cooking show presented by sockless men with forearms like hams, a thing about whales, Richard Osman\u2019s House of Games. Yes, George \u201cHijack\u201d Kay\u2019s six-part series is ostensibly a crime drama about the disappearance of the well-heeled wife of a private school headteacher. But this is merely the sales pitch to get it through the front door; behind the blandishments squirm a multitude of wrigglier, trickier things. Things such as the nature of guilt and co-dependence, the burden of professional expectation, preoccupied schoolboys, the banality of evil and unusually large dalmatians uncovering corpses in glades (\u201cCasper \u2026?! OH GOD\u201d). It is an exceedingly rum do: a huge, confounding and shrewdly elusive thing. Every hideously tense second is weighted with the sense that something Profound and\/or Awful is about to rear up from the bracken and thwack us in our preconceptions.<\/p>\nTo Bristol, then, where a school rugby match is in full swing, the camera flitting between a forest of straining thighs as St Bartholomew\u2019s stiff-backed headteacher Michael Polly (David Morrissey) watches expressionlessly from the sidelines. Michael\u2019s team wins: huzzah! But what is this? The teacher appears curiously unmoved by the boys\u2019 victory and is similarly unbothered when, later that afternoon, he discovers that his wife Sarah is missing from their chocolate box cottage.<\/p>\n
Night falls. Still no Sarah. Daughter Alana (Emma Appleton) grows distraught. \u201cDad,\u201d she says hesitantly. \u201cI\u2019m getting frightened. Did you, did you \u2026 argue?\u201d Silence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t argue,\u201d he finally replies, his back turned. A clock ticks. The chasm widens. \u201cWe never do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Suspense \u2026 Jennifer Macbeth as DC Becky Hammond and Eve Myles as Annie Cassidy Photograph: ITV<\/p>\n
The police are eventually, reluctantly, informed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow are you coping?\u201d asks watchful, dry-witted DS Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles). \u201cYou seem \u2026 very calm.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have 160 pupils about to sit exams,\u201d replies Michael. \u201cThose predicted grades will determine which universities they go to. The fact that their headmaster\u2019s wife has not been seen for 24 hours shouldn\u2019t concern them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Annie narrows her eyes. \u201cI mean,\u201d she later muses to a colleague, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot that\u2019s not right there.\u201d<\/p>\n
There certainly is. But what? Guilt? Or a brand of self-control that has, surely, gone the way of the dinosaurs? Fastidious Michael, with his prewar haircut and neatly pressed waistcoat, is firmly, crisply unreadable. Not a blank, exactly (this is, after all, David Morrissey; few actors can do more with a fleeting nostril-twitch), but very much a closed book. Great pains have been taken to hammer shut his emotional vault; Michael has very possibly smothered it in garlic before sealing it in lead. He seems oblivious to the discomfort of those around him. Or is this merely another form of control? \u201cHe\u2019s a headmaster,\u201d observes Annie\u2019s gloriously rumpled, seen-it-all friend Carol (the ever-wonderful Clare Higgins). \u201cHe\u2019ll be used to getting it all his own way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHmm,\u201d replies Annie, who has also seen (and, indeed, cohabited with) the type before. Talking of which, here comes charming ex Craig (Peter McDonald), whose efforts to win back Annie may not be as chipper as they appear.<\/p>\n
Other things happen. Schoolboy Dylan (Billy Barratt) seems burdened by something. A cold case involving a missing teenager re-emerges from the past. There are lingering aerial shots of dense woodland: not the common sort, with its fly-tipped toilets, but the well-to-do sort; the sort where dog-walkers wave to one another and the corpses have the decency to wear Barbour.<\/p>\n
Gone makes us work for our supper. Clues arrive at the table slowly and from unexpected angles. Stuff turns up and \u2013 twang \u2013 our preconceptions are once again catapulted into the nearest thicket (watch out, Casper!)<\/p>\n
Suspense builds, continues to build, and then \u2013 the tension! \u2013 builds some more. How long before the elastic snaps back? \u201cNot telling,\u201d tee-hees Gone, waving more horrible things at us before scampering back into the undergrowth.<\/p>\n
If there is a tauter, clammier or more engrossing drama this year I will eat my mortarboard with chips.<\/p>\n
Gone aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now. It is streaming in Australia on Stan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What is Gone? Easier, perhaps, to list the things that Gone is not, if only to give ourselves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-465424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}