Fleapit revisited:Together.

Lockdown was a new experience to almost everybody. But that is not to say it was the same experience for everybody. Some people were locked down in large houses with large gardens and surrounded by loving family members. Others, like me, were locked down alone in a flat with no garden and nobody around (except those on the end of the phone or on Zoom). But the people who had it worse, in my view, were those who were forced to stay in properties with people, partners, they no longer loved.

Some of those relationships would have been abusive and cruel. Others would have simply been unhappy or discontent and director Stephen Daldry's Together (BBC2/iPlayer), perhaps wisely, focused on an imagined example of the latter rather than the former. The couple involved, simply listed as 'he' (James McAvoy) and 'she' (Sharon Horgan), lived in a nice middle class house with well stocked cupboards and fridge with their ten year old son (Artie Logan) who, we learn, refuses to eat anything except aubergine katsu curry.

Despite their comfortable lives, all is not rosy. He's a Tory (but one who voted for Tony Blair) who loves Rishi Sunak, a wealthy self-made man who boasts about his E-Class Benz, slags off 'virtue signalling' and people who eat chicken nuggets, thinks everything is about profit, and doesn't agree with "most refugees" on "principal".

She's a borderline socialist, a Corbynista even, who works for a charity helping those very refugees. She's rarely seen not in cardigan and/or dungarees and her mum, we discover, had links to the Angry Brigade and used to read little Artie Das Kapital in his cot. Both Horgan and McAvoy are, of course, as brilliant in their roles as they always are.

Starting on 24th March last year, to the strains of Supertramp's Breakfast in America and those now all too familiar apocalyptic news bulletins, writer Dennis Kelly sketches out their journey over one year of on/off lockdown. How they reevaluate both their relationship and their lives. Much wine is drunk, much beer is drunk, and much tea is drunk. They eat meals, they moan about WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter (but remain addicted, of course), and they bicker almost endlessly.

But, beneath that, there is still some residual fondness between them and even, grudgingly articulated, some mutual respect. After a fashion, there is even a resumption of their presumably long abandoned sex life. Even if both parties agree that the love making has become "purely contractual", enjoyably functional.

When Together began, I felt the constant breaking of the fourth wall would be a problem for me. That it would be too knowing, too arch, and too pleased with itself. But as the drama developed I barely noticed it. It just became an effective method of telling their story and, in fact, was what it made it work.

I'd also, incorrectly, imagined Together to be a comedy (perhaps because of Horgan's appearance) but although there were a few laugh out loud lines (she to he:- "you've got the same level of charm as diarrhoea - in a pint glass", a story about his surprise birthday treat for her - mushroom picking in the "New Fucking Forest") they served more as accurate observations on life during a pandemic, or in a parlous relationship, when humour becomes a vital tool for helping us negotiate our way through it.

It wasn't the only well turned observation. We see them stockpile toilet roll, we see that well stocked fridge covered with Artie's drawings of rainbows and "THANK YOU NHS" slogans, and we see them decorate the Christmas tree for what, like most of us last year, would have been a pared down and lonelier than normal festive season.

We also hear them complain about the scandalous lack of PPE in care homes and that time when the official advice was to not wear masks. Together pulls no punches when it comes to illustrating some of the most upsetting episodes of the pandemic. We hear stories of people given fifteen minutes to say goodbye to a loved one, people watching their parents die on FaceTime via a mobile phone propped up on a chair next to a hospital bed, and people dying completely alone.

As In The Bleak Midwinter is movingly sung, via Zoom, during the bleakest of midwinters, Together does not hold back when it comes to naming those who are directly to blame for not mitigating the worst of the Covid pandemic in the UK. One incisive, and impassioned, speech from Horgan's character makes it very clear that the one week delay in lockdown (when Boris Johnson was still boasting of shaking everyone's hand having, it is believed, refused to read any of his briefing notes on the virus) cost the country approximately twenty thousand extra deaths.

A lethal repeat of this mistake towards the end of 2020 probably resulted in tens of thousands more. There is righteous and correct anger at our government's, the government of Boris Johnson that many in my family actually voted for, fatal negligence and it is spelt out very clearly that many of the victims of the pandemic didn't so much die as they were killed by an uncaring government.

The UK still has the seventh highest death toll on the entire planet (behind the US, Brazil, India, Mexico, Peru, and Russia) and the government that ensured that death toll was so high are still in power. While I came away from Together hoping that 'he' and 'she' would resolve their differences (or split up amicably for the sake of Artie), I also came away from it feeling that the differences between right thinking, and caring, people and the current British administration can only be resolved by that government's removal from power. It probably won't happen and further tragedies will be played out on the British public. Elsewhere in the world, they'll wonder why we do it to ourselves. The relationship between McAvoy and Horgan's characters may have been sour but it was not abusive. The relationship between the British government and the British people, sadly, is.