"What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation" - Don Delillo.
Shane Meadows' recent Channel 4 four parter The Virtues was set in a world (Ireland mainly) of twilit train platforms, municipal parks, greasy spoons, and petty jobsworths. On the surface, a life of ferries, council estate pubs, hopper buses, vaping, and building sites, but one underwritten by a dark netherworld of hospital beds, panic attacks, flashbacks, demons, and repressed memories.
It was also one of the most brilliant, tender, moving, and, at all times, completely real pieces of television I have ever seen. Every single episode had me in floods of tears and that's as much down to the wonderful performances of Stephen Graham (who, it turns out, does alcoholic just as authentically as he does toxic masculinity) and, as the series develops, Niamh Algar as feisty but broken hearted Dinah as it was Meadows story of profound redemption.
Graham plays Joseph, a manual worker living alone in Sheffield. His flat is averagely messy and none too homely looking and his ex, Debbie (Juliet Ellis), and her new partner (David, played by Vauxhall Jermaine) are taking his young son, Shea (Shea Michael-Shaw), off to start a new life in Australia. The four of them have a nice dynamic, they have a goodbye meal together and Joseph suggests that Shea calls David Dad to make life easier down under, but this is a Meadows drama so we know something's going to go wrong - and it very soon does.
Clearly, something has already gone wrong - and not just because Debbie is with David and not Joseph now. Joseph's got a problem with the booze and, following a suggested period of abstinence, losing his son appears to be the cataclysmic event that may just cause him, or give him the excuse to, fall off the wagon.
Sure enough it's not long before we see Joseph sat alone in a pub with a pint. It's not long before he's trading up to vodka. It's not long before he's ingratiating himself with a table full of strangers and buying them drinks. Trays of shots and lines of coke in the bogs follow. He falls over. He's helped home but finds himself tempted by another bar where he's kicked out by bouncers.
Despite my friend Darren saying the scenes of drunkenness reminded him of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar in That Mitchell and Webb Look they felt, to me, terrifyingly real. Familiar even. Watching this pathetic, paralytic man block out his demons with industrial quantities of booze and transitory friendships before waking up on the floor, fully dressed naturally, caked in puke and piss and covered in cuts and bruises.
Ignoring knocks on the door, Joseph has a wash, he has a cry (thankfully Meadows spares us the inevitable guilt laden hangover wank), and then refuses to take a call from his own child because he's so riddled with shame. When asked about his bruises he lies that he fell off a ladder at work and it's not long before he's sat on a park bench contemplating a plastic bottle of strong cider.
That he overcomes the temptation of yet another trip to oblivion is an indication that Joseph's alcoholism is more symptom than cause of his problems. It's not long before he's on a ferry from Birkenhead to Belfast and, following a failed attempt to hitch hike (in these days?) to the Republic, he walks through the night in the pouring rain to a small Irish village and falls asleep by the side of the road.
Michael and Anna have three children and, following twenty four hours of feverish sleep, Joseph wakes in one of their beds. Michael and Anna house Joseph, they feed him, and Michael even gets him some work for his building firm. There he meets Craigy (Mark O'Halloran) who's recently been in trouble for exposing himself to an elderly couple out walking their dogs and quite evidently has his own demons buried away in the back of his mind.
Dinah, Michael's problematic sister, crops up too. Described, memorably, by Anna as a "hot mess", we first see Dinah clouting some guy, presumably some kind of ex-boyfriend, who's hassling her but she's soon revealed to be, as all are in Meadows productions - none are given the discourtesy of being rendered two dimensional, a far more rounded character, and a much more empathetic person.
A person with her own skeletons in the cupboard too, and as the drama develops she becomes as much the key protagonist as Joseph. We're gently introduced to her back story and find out the reasons why she no longer has any contact with the child she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager.
A friend of mine, Richard, commented on just how much space there was in The Virtues. The story was allowed room to breathe, the character development was free of laden exposition and instead allowed for lingering glances, seemingly throwaway comments, and painfully quiet car journeys to let us build up our own vivid pictures in our heads and work things out for ourselves.
As in life itself, we always knew roughly the destination we were travelling towards but we had no idea what we were going to find when we got there. Lots of close ups of cobwebs and spiders suggested we were mere flies with no chance whatsoever of avoiding the traps that life sets for us. Catholic imagery, in the form of crucifixes mainly but even the show's title, peppered the whole experience but never completely dominated.
Catholic guilt and improper behaviour by the custodians of the church was hinted at, rather than shouted about. There was little impassioned speechifying. Instead there were flashbacks to youth that got increasingly less fuzzy and there was a trip back to an abandoned and ruined ex-children's home that brought back some predictably disturbing memories for Joseph.
As The Virtues nears its denouement the tension, already almost unbearable, and the sadness that's been there from the very start are ramped up. PJ Harvey's excellent score moves away from songs into the realm of urgent and atmospheric strings and missed phone calls carry the weight of the world and the possibility of potentially shattering any chance of salvation that Joseph and Dinah may have had.
But, at all times, the action feels utterly believable. These are people you can imagine meeting, imagine caring about, imagine being friends with and it tears your heart out to watch what they have to go through. The industrial language (Meadows is generous when dishing out fucks and cunts) is exactly the way people speak in these moments and even in slightly happier times there are classic lines to marvel at. A drunken Joseph tells Dinah she has "little youth club tits" and the next morning Anna says of Joseph:- "turns out my brother's a massive fucking dickhead".
In Lucy Mangan's five star Guardian review of The Virtues she wrote, and I paraphrase only slightly, about a "desperate attempt by a suffering soul to escape by any means necessary, without fully realising how or why the experiences corrode from within" and she's hit the nail on the head there. We can run from our demons if we like but we''ll be running forever. One day we'll have to look them in the face and the strange thing is that our demons, like us, may prove to be equally human and equally fallible.
This was exemplary television making of the sort that rarely comes out of Britain anymore. Working class people not portrayed as heroic strivers or feckless shirkers but complicated human beings with hopes, fears, and desires not just for themselves but for those they love and care about. It's vital we see lives like this reflected on the screen and it's vital that directors like Shane Meadows continue to shine a torch into those dark corners of society, and those dark corners of our soul, so we can confront our own anxieties. I found it sad beyond belief but I also found in it a catharsis that is woefully lacking in so much else.
Praise and props to Meadows for making The Virtues, likewise to all the cast (including a shout out to Michael Starke, Sinbad from Brookside, for his brief cameo). Not a single line, not a single shot, not a single moment felt wasted. Stephen Graham and Niamh Algar, the stars of the piece, are due particular credit for bringing to life these truly three dimensional characters.
It's said we're all only one or two wrong decisions away from being in penury and despair and to imbue such warmth and humanity on people at a time when many in the country, and the world, are looking to hate preachers and demagogues to solve their problems takes a very strong heart. But it takes a tender one too. It's easy to judge. It's a lot harder to empathise. The Virtues, even deep into its toughest moments, always remembered that true strength comes in kindness, not in cruelty. A masterpiece.
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