Steve, a character in Prisoners' Wives (BBC One, Tuesday, 9pm), may be guilty of murder but at least he knows the rules of grammar and punctuation.
"Let me take care of you – give up your job," he says in a card to his pregnant wife, proving he knows the difference between "your" and "you're" and that educational standards among convicts are not as bad as we might think. If only the same could be said of TV producers. When it appeared on screen, the show's title read: "Prisoners Wives". No apostrophe. First Waterstones. Now this.
The first episode followed four women as they tried to cope with the fact their husbands were in jail, but the whole thing was a bit Tammy Wynette. It was stand-by-your-man television. What's a little thing like brutally killing another human being if you luv im? Gemma, one of the wives, clearly understood this. "But I love him!" she wailed repeatedly. All she needed was a steel guitar and she could have released a single.
The epitome of it all was Francesca, a woman with Bonnie Tyler hair and lips like a bouncy castle. When she arrived at the prison in her big BMW, Whitney Houston's I'm Every Woman was playing on the stereo because what else would be playing? "No-one knows what it's like," she said, her lipgloss glistening in the prison strip-lighting. "But we do."
The fact that Francesca was such a terrible old stereotype meant it was the male characters who ended up being more interesting. Particularly good was Iain Glen as Paul, a felon with a voice made from cigarettes and a face all lined and curled-up like a pirate's treasure map. This was clearly a man used to prison and it was interesting to see his attempts to control his wife from inside the prison. If the first episode had done more to explore this area of male identity, it might have been more watchable.
The problem was the main narrative following Gemma and Steve just wasn't interesting enough. It had no hooks or snags to pull you along – it just glided past like an idea you first saw a long time ago. Thirty years ago, in fact, when Lynda La Plante wrote Widows and tried to show what the criminal life can do to women. And she did it in a surprising way; she did it with the twist of originality and daring.
Gemma and Steve's story had none of that and was also shot in the most extraordinarily teenage way. Particularly cringy was the moment when the camera cut between Steve in his cell and Gemma in her house. A picture of Steve looking dreamily into the distance melted into a picture of Gemma looking dreamily into the distance and back again, while music played in the background. It was like the video for Especially For You if Kylie and Jason had been banged up.
In fact, I wonder if Stock, Aitken and Waterman actually had a hand in the script. Take this little example from Francesca: "You'll find a way to live. Every day when you wake up, you reach out and there's no-one there, to share, to hold your hand, to be there. And the questions. Does this count? Is this still love?" To me, it sounds like one of Rick Astley's.
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