We Are All Guilty:Guilt S1.

"Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt" - Plautus

All of us, sociopaths excepted, feel guilty at times. We may feel guilty about relatively small things like forgetting a friend's birthday, not calling our parents enough, or being late for work. We may feel guilty about more important things like failing in relationships and work. A very small number of us will feel guilty because we have committed criminally transgressive actions.

In Guilt (BBC Scotland/iPlayer, written and created by Neil Forsyth and directed by Robert McKillop - originally aired back in October/November 2019) the action focuses far more on that more serious form of guilt. We begin with brothers Max (Mark Bonnar) and Jake (Jamie Sives) driving home from a wedding in Edinburgh. While they're arguing about the morality of heated car seats they hit a man who has wandered into the road and kill him.

They decide not to call the police but to cover it up. So they drag his body back into his house and prop it up in an armchair. In the house they discover a letter which informs them that they man they've just run over, Walter (Joe Donnelly), had terminal cancer.

Walter appears to live on his own but when Max and Jake drive away from the crime scene, the upstairs lights in Walter's house go off. It's the first sign that this will not be the end of this. Not least because Max seems to find it a lot easier to move on from what's happened from Jake.

They may be brothers but they're cut from very different cloth. There's not a lot of love lost between the two of them. Jake is a romantic at heart. A failed rock star, he lives alone above a chip shop, he runs a record shop in Leith, and he's one of those guys who likes to 'educate' women about music. A pain in the arse perhaps but a well meaning one. Max despairs of his "fuckwittery".

Max, though, is a different kind of fuckwit. He rants about them having a cash bar at a wedding, he plays golf, he's selfish, he's arrogant, he's greedy, and, of course, he's hugely successful (running a prestige law firm). He lives in a nice big house with his beautiful wife, Claire (Sian Brooke) who, it soon becomes apparent, is less happy with how things are going. 

Things become trickier still for Max and Jake when Jake reveals he accidentally left his wallet in Walter's house. He attends Walter's wake to retrieve it and there he meets Walter's niece, Angie (Ruth Bradley), who's come over from Chicago to mourn the uncle she barely knew. Jake and Angie bond over a shared love of Bowie and making lists, become friends, and then become lovers. She doesn't even seem to mind Jake's constant mansplaining.

It doesn't seem very wise of Jake and when Angie becomes concerned that Walter didn't have an autopsy/post-mortem and that he had severely bruised legs despite apparently dying from cancer things become even more desperate. Very quickly, everything seems set up to unravel spectacularly.

Which it does - but not in obvious ways. In Guilt, nobody ever tells the whole truth (maybe that's how life is), hardly anybody is who they seem to be, and people turn out to have links to others that you would never have suspected, and everyone, for some reason - product placement, uses a very dated looking Alcatel phone. It's quite a ridiculous premise but it's a very enjoyable watch.

New characters are gradually brought in. There's Kenny (Emun Elliott), a seriously alcoholic private investigator who cleans up and takes a bit too much interest in Walter's story, there's Sheila (Ellie Haddington), an old lady who was Walter's neighbour who seems to know something but doesn't say what, and there's Tina (Moyo Akande), a fitness instructor whose classes Claire attends and then befriends Claire before making a pass at her. What are Tina's intentions?

Soon we're in a world where lie is piled upon lie and deceit upon deceit. As the story unravels it takes in garden gnomes, condescending comments about Rod Stewart's oeuvre (Jake of course), unswerving loyalty to Hibernian FC, dummy cameras, prescription drugs, creative accounting, double crossing, blackmail (both emotional and financial), arson, and violence.

Max and Jake find themselves coming into contact with some very shady businessmen in the shape of Roy Lynch (Bill Paterson, an old hand at playing Scottish baddies) and Cameron Lovat (Noof Ousellam). One of their accomplices, Stevie Malone (Henry Pettigrew) works as a policeman. What's going on there? Is he a bent copper or is he carrying undercover police work?

What do you think? As we delve into this tale of sibling rivalry, loyalties tested to the point of destruction, sordid pasts, dimly lit bars, and an incredible number of twists and turns we find ourselves gripped by a tense, addictive, and often chilling (as Sheila, Haddington does chilling brilliantly) tale.

There's great supporting roles for Michael Nardone who plays Henry McKinnon, the man tasked with enacting Walter's will, Tom Urie as Sheila's son Gordie, and Anneika Rose as Stevie's police partner Nicola and there's an atmospheric and sometimes, intentionally, jarring score courtesy of Arthur Sharpe. The soundtrack seems to reflect Jake's record collection (all vinyl of course) and features Can, Steely Dan, The Rolling Stones, The Clash, and Darondo.

Both Sives and Bonnar are great in the two main roles. Sives has a forlorn look borne of a lifetime of disappointment but Bonnar's performance is a masterclass in edge, manipulation, and desperation. There's two more series of Guilt ready to go on the iPlayer as I type. I look forward to digging in. I won't feel guilty about that.