Shearsmith and Pemberton's quirky, dark and grimly comic tales can be something of an acquired taste. Often elements of the grotesque and blackly comic seem to be present merely on account of their capacity to shock...because they are expected by their fan-base, familiar with 'The League of Gentlemen' and 'Psychoville'.
This is different.
This is VERY different.
Alternating between the bizarre and the mundane, the romantic and the surreal, this is a gloriously layered, unsettling retrospective of the peaks an troughs of a woman's life which gloriously wrong- foots the audience's expectations at every turn. Is it a nightmare, where Dream Logic reigns? Is our heroine going mad? Elements of 'Jacob's Ladder' are employed as the audience becomes aware of the nature of her experience just as she does. The hints are all there, and watching the show again, recently, reinforced my appreciation of the subtlety of the piece: the significance of Bocelli's recurring 'Con te partirò', SHOULD be obvious, but isn't...until the final frames, as Sheridan Smith looks directly into camera. Utterly heartbreaking.
Mr Shearsmith and Mr Pemberton...well done, indeed, gentlemen. I can only agree with some of the other reviewers on IMDb that this was the best 30 minutes of television I have seen for a very long time.
The cast is excellent too, of course, but this piece belongs to Sheridan Smith, a performer with exemplary comic timing and a natural command of tragedy - a rare combination. It's an irony that such an extraordinary talent's most engaging characteristic is her apparent ordinary-ness: we relate to her far more than any of P&S's brasher creations.
It continues to surprise me that this woman is not a major star, internationally.
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