Why Does The Sun Go On Shining? Too Close.

"Why does the sun go on shining? Why does the sea rush the shore? Don't they know it's the end of the world 'cause you don't love me anymore?" - The End of the World, Skeeter Davis

"How does everyone else function? I just don't understand. Why aren't the streets full of wrecked people?" - Connie Mortensen

In the dark of night as the rain lashes down almost biblically, a young mum with two children in the back of her car drives off a high bridge into the river below. Intentionally. Remarkably she and both the children survive. So, at least, it's not a case of bridge over double slaughter but there are serious questions to be answered by that young mother, Connie Mortensen (Debbie Gough) in ITV's recent Too Close.

With regards to both her intentions and her mental state. The person tasked with asking those questions is forensic psychiatrist Dr Emma Robertson (Emily Watson) and, it soon becomes clear, Emma has her own skeletons in the closet. Something Connie seems immediately, almost spookily, aware of.

When she spots a book of Simon Armitage poems in Emma's bag she begins a series of, often cruel, observations about Emma's appearance and her relationship with her husband Si (Risteard Cooper). Who Connie insists on calling Si Hubby after seeing that was the name his number was filed under on Emma's phone.

Connie suggests Si Hubby is having an affair and then gets further into Emma's head with talk of "once a month duty fucks" and how kisses between Emma and Si are now full of an "unbearable intimacy". Connie seems to be able to read Emma like a book and has the knack for both pushing her buttons and pushing her to distraction. Is this because Emma's life is not, despite huge surface differences, so different to Connie's after all?

Connie, who the tabloids have taken to calling the "yummy mummy monster", will talk about pretty much everything except what happened that night, on that bridge, with those children. Even as it is made clear she faces a potential thirty year stretch in jail for attempted murder.

As the story develops both from Connie's room in a secure unit and Emma's large suburban house and in flashbacks to happier (and unhappier) times for all concerned, Connie talks of being "skinned, boned, and filleted" and we pick up Connie's story from the time she made friends with her new neighbour Ness (Thalissa Teixeira).

Ness and Connie, initially, seem somewhat besotted by each other. From being freaked out when Ness buys, and wears, the same perfume as her - Single White Female style, to furtive glances at Ness's boobs during a bathtime wine session. Connie and Ness drink together, smoke joints together, and share the secrets of each other's lives and when Ness splits up with her partner Leah (Jackie Clune), "that lesbian that reads the news" according to Connie's unfiltered mum Julia (Eileen Davies), it seems like a green light for Connie to make a move.

Things, of course, don't pan out this way and soon a safe middle class world of acoustic guitars strummed at parties, yoga, face painting, faux hippy chic, and Foxtons estate agents is upended and a story soon unfolds of anxiety, insomnia, grief, betrayal, ageing, infidelity, medication, and dissociative amnesia. With a discreet, yet audible, background hubbub of paparazzi inspired pitchfork mobs.

Too Close ran the risk of being another example of cookie cutter ITV dead child misery porn but as the story developed it hewed away from police, or forensic, procedural to become more a character study of the two leads, their lives, and the shifting dynamic between them. There are genuinely moving moments and, until very near the end, I had absolutely no idea how things would pan out.

One scene sent a chill racing up my back and if there was nothing quite as moving as there was in other recent dramas like, say, Deadwater Fell or Noughts and Crosses that's not to throw shade on Too Close, its performers, and its creators. Most of which were female. A novel by Natalie Daniels had been adapted, produced, and directed by Clara Salaman, Sue Tully (Michelle Fowler from Eastenders!), and Laetitia Knight and with the two female leads filling the screen, either together or apart for almost all three episodes, Too Close was that still too rare a thing, a story about women's lives, told by women themselves.

For that alone it should be applauded but it wouldn't mean much unless it was comepelling viewing and, thankfully, it was. I never really got the significance of the kite stuck in the tree outside Connie's room, the scenes with the unicorn brooch were a little overplayed, and, brilliant and tender though the song is, they didn't need to include The End of the World by Skeeter Davis quite so many times.

Perhaps it was supposed to signify the earworms that tend to haunt, or inhabit, us at our lowest ebbs. Supporting roles were less well drawn than leading ones but Jamie Sivers as Karl (Connie's husband), Chizzy Akudulo (Addy, a care worker), Ariyon Bakare (Dougie Thompson, an old friend of Emma's she bumps into in the park), and Adrian Head (Kenneth Baines, a lorry driver involved in a very different kind of 'bump') and Davies and Karl Johnson as Connie's ageing parents, both suffering to varying degrees with dementia, all do well with the little screen time they're given in what, at heart, is a story of two women, how their lives have brought them to their current situations, and what, if anything, they can do about it.

While Skeeter Davis sings, once more, of not being able to see any future, of her heart continuing to beat long after the love in it has departed, we hope that, somehow, the women, and the children, in Too Close will find the healing they need. Night is always darkest just before the sun comes up.