Ray & Liz

I think part of my problem with this is that having grown up in a room and kitchen in a 1970s Glasgow tenement where we bathed in the sink, once a week, in water freshly boiled from the kettle atop the metred gas stove, I find these “northern” (English) tales of woe and misfortune all a bit melodramatic. Compared to previous generations, these Brummies don’t know they are born as they live in housing estates resourced to a level we could only have ever dreamed of a few years earlier. Are they the cause of their own deprivation or has it ground whatever spirit they did have out of them? Well we have three threads to advise us on that. There’s alcoholic “Ray”, his chain-smoking wife “Liz” and their two, largely neglected, sons “Richard” and “Jason”. Now reduced to living in a fairly rundown council flat their lives are pretty much on autopilot until “Jason” (Joshua Millard-Lloyd) gets a chance to stay with a school friend overnight and discovers just how other families function without the need for a constant supply of booze. It’s really these two boys who made this work at all for me, as both he and sibling “Richard” (Jacob Tuton played the younger lad) offer us quite contrasting attitudes to the shocking parental indifference epitomised by their mother (Ella Smith) whose solution to problems - when they couldn’t be ignored - was to eradicate them. It’s set during Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in a part of the country that didn’t really buy into her Conservative philosophies and counted the formidable Betty Boothroyd as one of it’s constituency MPs, so we can assume the narrative from auteur John Billingham isn’t going to be supportive of policies seen at the time as divisive and self-serving, but when you look at the characters he presents us with it is really very difficult to empathise or feel sympathy for these folk. They don’t care a jot about themselves, so why should we? On that front, both Smith and Justin Salinger’s younger iteration of “Ray” actually deliver potently. They are entirely convincing, just not very likeable as they wallow in their introspective misery. This does touch on a wide variety of social issues, including those around mental health and there is comedy here too that is both dark and occasionally really quite witty as it helps illustrate their attitudes to their addictions and squalor, but I’m afraid I found the whole thing just a bit too self-piteous. It’s grim, but to an extent life’s what you make it, and they couldn’t have made their own beds.