So sad:about Us.

"Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving but how can they know it's time for them to go? Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming. I have no thought of time for who knows where the time goes?" - Who Knows Where The Time Goes, Fairport Convention.

"Apologies mean nothing when the damage is done. But I can't switch off my loving like you can't switch off the sun" - So Sad About Us, The Who.

A greying middle aged man wrestles with a cardboard box at a municipal recycling centre while clutching his distressed and lined forehead with a pasty arm freckled with greying hairs and adorned with a now forgotten watch that must once have been his pride and joy. A fragment, a snapshot, in the life of a man who's had his whole world pulled from underneath him following his wife's request for a divorce and his child's growing up.

Empty nest syndrome! It's a real thing. It's not something I've suffered from or ever will do (I have no children, my nest is always empty) but it is something I've witnessed happen around me and it's something that Geoffrey Sax (director) and David Nicholls (writer) captured perfectly and beautifully in their recent four part drama Us on BBC1.

But Us was about far more than empty nest syndrome. This sweet and gentle, yet hugely powerful, marital breakup drama set against the backdrop of a grand tour of Europe also tackled themes of growing up, identity, alienation, sexual awakening, regret, and loss. It did, on many occasions, regular readers will not be surprised to learn, make me cry.

The drama begins with the artistic, free spirited, empathetic Connie Petersen (Saskia Reeves) politely requesting not just a divorce from the stilted, practical, business minded Douglas (Tom Hollander) but a change and a new start too. For both of them. It's remarkable in the fairly humdrum way such a major life event is delivered and the series' deft handling of the issue progresses in a way quite different from previous divorce dramas I've watched. This is not Kramer Vs Kramer.

 

 

The story develops both forwards, as we witness Douglas and Connie embark on their European tour with their son Albie (Tom Taylor captures almost perfectly that teenage feeling of awkwardness and discovery), and backwards as we flash back to revisit poignant moments in the lives of young Douglas (Iain de Caestecker) and young Connie (Gina Bramhill). Often played out in the mind of Douglas as he lies awake at night pondering the decisions and choices he's made in the past. Pondering, in fact, the very nature of his self.

 

 

We see their first meeting:- Connie:- bohemian, drug taking, sporting a black leather jacket and a beautiful blonde bob, Douglas:- nerdy, gauche, straight, sensible, and decked out in a suit complete with a wool tie. We see them on nights out with Connie's friends, Douglas eager to leave, Connie keen to continue the party, we see them dancing to Always by Erasure at their wedding reception, we see them receive the happy news they're to become parents of a girl, and we witness the heartbreaking anguish as the baby, Jane, is born prematurely early and dies before she ever leaves hospital.

Jane is but one of many ghosts who not so much haunt Douglas and Connie's relationship as linger in the background and most of them are explored in this wonderful drama. But often it's the little things about their personalities that are the most telling. Douglas makes dad jokes and says dad things, he refuses to look at maps when he's lost, he takes a fun quiz too seriously and demands a recount, he talks about leaving early to 'beat the crowds' and how much things cost, and, cough, worries about not doing his ten thousand steps each day.

He lacks spontaneity and he's, not to put too fine a point on it, not a lot of fun. Connie loves him but she's concerned about entering the 'afternoon nap' phase of her life and wants more than Douglas does from what life they both have left. Douglas, now that Albie's moving on, looks forward to going to the dump. A place he calls, only partially tongue in cheek, 'a fortress of solitude'.

Albie, too, has got stuff going on. A promising photographer with a Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever poster on his bedroom wall, he's inherited his mum's love for culture but he struggles to find connection with his father and, despite both his parents attempt to protect him from the news of their impending separation, he has a keen sense of being caught in the crossfire. At seventeen years old, all this is happening in what appears to be his first summer of sexual awakening.

A summer that is being spent, in Albie's words, on a school trip but with just him and two teachers. Handsome, blond, and tall, looking to me like a young Russell Howard, he hooks up with feisty busker Kat (Thaddea Graham) who becomes overly familiar with Douglas and Connie, pilfers rolls and preserves from the hotel buffet much to Douglas' annoyance, and entertains tourists with a fair to middling rendition of Ewan MacColl's Dirty Old Town. Unlike Albie, she does not lack in confidence.

 

As Albie lives out his youth and slowly comes round to the fact that his father is neither a monster nor a model - just another person, like him, trying to do his best, Douglas and Connie occasionally try to relive theirs. But no amount of kissing and canoodling and zipping round the picture postcard perfect streets of Paris on scooters can prevent them dredging up their memories, delving into the emotional detritus of their life, and, ultimately, facing the reckoning that slowly but surely enters into all but the most shallow lives.

 

We see Douglas pondering alone and sad in various upmarket European hotels and beauty spots and we see him trying to save both his relationships with Connie and Albie as he hotfoots it from Paris to Amsterdam and on to Venice, Siena, Barclelona, Sitges, and finally back home in anonymous suburban England where the deneoument of Us appears doomed to play out.

 

On his increasingly frantic journey Douglas manages to lose his luggage on a train in Empoli, get horrendously sun burnt, sleep in an Italian police cell, and get painfully stung by jellyfish in the Balearic Sea. But he also runs into a kindred spirit in the Danish dentist Freja (Sofie Grabol). Freja's in Venice 'celebrating' her divorce, literally eating her dinner in an empty restaurant, after her dentist husband left her for their hygienist and a life of eternal flossing in Copenhagen.

 

Douglas and Freja discover 'lonely tourism' works better when experienced together and amusingly, and touchingly, discuss what activities work well alone (cinema, theatre) and which don't (zoos, the circus, paintballing, karaoke). They both share a sadness and a sense of rejection but with Douglas clearly still in love with Connie is it even possible they could share a romance?

Screening at a time of the worst global pandemic for a century it's easy to be envious of the glamorous hotels we can't stay in at the moment and the international locations we can't visit at the moment (the shots of Barcelona look particularly swoonsome and the film makers never miss a chance to film a scene in the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum) but every shot of the canals of Amsterdam and Venice and every beautiful Vermeer, Canaletto, Gericault, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Arcimboldo, stunning though they are, always plays backdrop to what, at heart, is an all too familiar story of a family struggling to stay together.

Us made me realise how much I've missed being able to travel this year (though I was fortunate to enjoy two lovely weekends in Wales either side of lockdown) but, more than that, it shone a light on more lasting concerns in my life. As Douglas and Connie sat side by side in bed reading their books it dawned on me such moments had not been part of my life for over a decade now and I became nostalgic not for the past but for the future I once imagined I might have.

 

The ageing faces of Douglas and Connie appeared to me, at first, as much older than they were supposed to be but, like me, they're in their fifties (a fact which is painfully highlighted by the appearance of Eva Herzigova's 1994 'HELLO BOYS' Wonderbra poster on a wall in the background and the sound of Portishead's Roads at a party in the flashback scenes) and that had me thinking about my own advancing years, the decisions I've taken along this road to nowhere we call life, and my own mortality.

 

The story of the lost child, Jane, reminded me of losing my brother and hit home painfully hard and as the credits rolled Sandy Denny sang Fairport Convention's Who Knows Where The Time Goes and the power of the programme and the sheer magnitude and huge depth of emotions that come with being a living, breathing, feeling, loving person filled my body with a bittersweet mixture of sadness and joy.

 

 

You hold a magnifying glass over any life, no matter how ordinary it may appear, and look for long enough and what you'll see will be extraordinary. Extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily sad, and extraordinarily complex. All lives are unique but they are also all intertwined and united not just in experience but in sentiment and memory. 

 

Spending four hours in the company of Douglas, Connie, and Albie was like looking through that magnifying glass. Not with a scientific or inquiring mind but with a passionate, empathetic beating heart. We look at these people looking back at their lives at the same time as they move forwards in them and we can't help but do the same with our own lives. Even if, right now, we don't get to go on a grand tour of Europe to do so. When we cannot travel on planes and boats we travel instead in our hearts and minds. Culture is the vehicle in which we choose to make these journeys.