"Long afloat on shipless oceans, I did all my best to smile. 'Til your singing eyes and fingers drew me loving to your isle" - Song to the Siren, Tim Buckley.
It seemed appropriate that the second series of Laura Solon and Daisy Haggard's Back to Life (BBC3/iPlayer) should end with This Mortal Coil's sublime cover of Tim Buckley's romantic masterpiece Song to the Siren. For though Back to Life worked brilliantly as both a comedy and a dark crime drama, it was underpinned, for me, with a strangely moving love story.
The will-they/won't-they relationship between ex-jailbird Miri (Haggard herself) and the kind and gentle Billy (Adeel Akhtar). Picking up almost exactly what the first series left off we find Miri, with her newly crimped hair encouraging alpaca comparisons, working in a supermarket stacking shelves, and, following the revelations at the end of the previous series, undergoing fraught relationships with her parents, Caroline (Geraldine James) and Oscar (Richard Durden), and her best friend Mandy (Christine Bottomley).
Billy's sweetness towards Miri is lovely and touching but his shyness and his sense of duty to his now deceased wife prevent anything from happening. Instead they talk about sandwiches, eat ice creams, and he gives her her first mobile phone. A good one too. It's got Snake on it.
Elsewhere, her life is ever more complicated. Her new supermarket colleague, Phil (Charlie Rix), is a wispy 'tached manboy whose attempts to bully Miri fall flat pretty quickly, her ex-partner Dom (Jamie Michie) is living in his car, falling asleep halfway through doing a shit, and trying to get to know God - while at the same time remaining obsessed with having sex with anybody he can, and local police officer Tina (Juliet Cowan) seems dead set on getting revenge on Miri for calling her 'Tina tiny tits' at school.
More ominous by far, both the father and mother of Lara Boback, Miri's murder victim, has arrived in Hythe. John Boback (Adrian Edmondson in his best role for years) is not a happy man and is out to avenge Lara's death in a fruitless quest to quell his anger. Therapy certainly isn't working for him. We see one session where he talks of wanting to stop, to halt, and to destroy Miri.
His ex-wife, Norah (Lizzy McInnerny) has taken a more peaceful route but looks haunted not just by the loss of her daughter but by what it has done to her husband. When John organises a candle lit walk from the place of Lara's death to her grave for a vigil it opens up old wounds and leaves everyone with more questions than answers.
Back to Life S2 is a shade darker than the first series, there's lots of lingering shots of cliffs at sunset to set the mood, but there is still much that caused this viewer to laugh out loud. Caroline actually sending Dom a pic of his own dick, Miri calling Billy's mum Gaia (Meera Syal) a cunt at her own birthday party and telling a solitary magpie to "fuck off - or come back with a friend", and Tina trying to buy a Funny Foot ice lolly from an ice cream man immediately after identifying a dead body.
I also chuckled when Oscar called Miri a "sulky twat" before asking his wife "what is a twat?", when Miri discovers a drawer full of Billy's ex-wife's sex toys when he's getting her an Um Bongo from the fridge, and at many of Janice's antics (Jo Martin plays the probation officer brilliantly again, snaffling Frazzles, handing out Wagon Wheels, and carrying a bag full of jam tarts around with her.
When Meera Syal repeats the word 'cunt' it satisfied me far more than it should have done (I really am that puerile) and I felt quite pleased with myself when I noticed one of the locations used for filming was Dulwich Village (right by the Dulwich Picture Gallery and a short walk from my flat) but I must warn there is a spoiler included for anyone who, remarkably, has not seen Thelma and Louise yet.
All of this was well and good but Back to Life's main strengths were its excellent cast, its genuinely funny writing, its compelling plot, and, to go back to where I started, the gentle, almost teenage, romance between Miri and Billy. When she slipped his hand into hers and told her that she was a "good egg" I nearly melted. Back to Life may have been deluged with utterly filthy jokes but, at heart, it was quite delightful. Everyone involved in it, it seems, is a good egg too.
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