TV In a surprising move, I’m about to recommend a new ITV drama, something I don’t think I’ve been able to do since, well I don’t actually remember the last time I’ve even mentioned ITV on here. Writer Charlie Martin’s The Time Of Your Life (Mondays, 9pm) expands from a relatively simple premise -- Kate now aged thirty-five awakens from an eighteen year coma and has to come to terms with how the world has changed whilst she slept. It sounds like the kind of concept that would be rocket fuel for one of the US tv movies that appear in the afternoons on Channel Five, but what elevates the material is that Martin has placed Kate within an ensemble of her old school friends all grown up and her parents and all are rocked by her re-emergence and begin to question the lives they’ve led themselves in the intervening years.
To a degree this is an ensemble show in the style of Cold Feet, lots of friends of a certain age dealing with life’s problems; but Kate’s story undercuts the potential clichés. In the opening and closing voice over she talks about high school films, listing all of the tropes of the genre, of people meeting and revealing their occupations and in the end dancing together to whichever old song is being plugged on the soundtrack. But this story is also told with that exact formula, the opening twenty minutes in particular mirroring The Big Chill, each of the characters being contacted by phone except in this case the person who’s drawing them together has woken up rather than died.
Not content with this, Martin also introduces a cross genre element in the form of the mystery surrounding why Kate fell into the coma in the first place and the circumstances surrounding the death of the man she was with that night. If anyone knows the real truth they’re not saying and now and then Kate receives flashbacks to a night that she’s largely blocked from her memory and as she revisits the scene of her accident, you can tell the games afoot and that this bit of detection on her part is going to form one of the backbones of the series, hopefully bringing the audience back each week as more is revealed, Lost-style.
It’s been well cast too with actors that seem familiar from elsewhere but without the expected ‘star’ to overshadow anyone, most recognisable faces are probably Olivia Colman (Peep Show, Look Around You), Mark Bazeley (who played Alistair Campbell in The Queen),
Jemima Rooper (As If, erm Hex, Sinchronicity) and Geraladine James (everything ever made it seems). The key casting is probably the relatively unknown Genevieve O'Reilly as Kate and she’s amazing, convincingly suggesting a late teen trapped in a much older body without it becoming a goofy parody, remembering that eighteen is at the cusp of adulthood and for some people the moment that they mature.
According to this week’s Radio Times, episode two picks up the momentum drawing the viewer in further and I can’t wait. As my Primevil experience showed, I have a very low tolerance for series with poor first episodes and it’s refreshing to watching something and be hooked straight away. I love Steven Polikoff’s late work, especially Shooting The Past and Gideon's Daughter, and this often has the feel of an even more mainstream version of that with its sometimes impressionistic visuals evoking Kate’s coma memories. There was a lovely moment too which also reminded me of Perfect Strangers, where most of the cast had gathered in a stairwell just after Kate had come out of her coma -- she looks down and them, they look up at her and she asks:
‘Who the fuck are you?’
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