‘A Mother’s Son’: Episode 1 review

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As if to counterbalance the noisy, gaudy and relentlessly enthusiastic brashness of its light entertainment output, ITV1 seem to have set their drama department to work on producing as many tastefully restrained murder-and-melancholy mysteries as possible – preferably containing a mixture of urban normality and some dark, psychological nastiness lurking just below the surface.

A Mother’s Son stars Hermione Norris as Rosie Haleton, a recently remarried mother trying to make her new marriage to amiable solicitor Ben (Martin Clunes) work in spite of the domestic upheaval merging two families brings.

All appears to be going fairly smoothly, despite both partners having teenage children from previous relationships, when grim tragedy befalls the tranquil Suffolk seaside town in which they live. A local schoolgirl is found murdered out on the local dunes and Rosie – thanks to a pair of ominously bloodstained trainers – comes to suspect the unthinkable: that her son Jamie (Skins star Alexander Arnold) is responsible.

At first, she refuses to believe it – who would? Yet it isn’t long before she notices what had apparently escaped her amid the heady excitement of her love life: Jamie is going off the rails in a very creepy way.

‘He was watching me in the shower!’ new stepsister Jess (Antonia Clark) protests, leading to an almighty, swearword-heavy row involving the whole clan that climaxes with Ben trying and failing to control things (‘Out of my fucking way!’ Jamie snaps as he barges past his otically-stacked stepfather, unrestrained) and then carping to his new wife, ‘I’m going to talk to my kids.’

Things are plainly not, er, rosy in the Haleton garden – but is one of their newly-amalgamated brood a brutal killer or just a typically temperamental teen?

Norris is convincingly fraught as Rosie, and Clunes demonstrates creditable subtlety and reserve as a mild-mannered modern man trying to do his best in an increasingly complicated situation. (He’s so good, in fact, that those maddeningly awful Churchill adverts seem as long ago as his appearance alongside Peter Davison in Doctor Who.)

The supporting cast – which includes Paul McGann as Hermione’s ex-husband David and Nicola Walker as one of the detectives working the murder inquiry – is excellent, while the frequent recourse to moody long shots of the bleak North Sea coastline juxtapose nicely with the urban landscape of shops, schools and streets in which the bulk of the action takes place.

However, what seems to be lacking is a genuine sense of dramatic tension. The first episode drifts by in an engaging mixture of mystery and moodiness, but it falters to an end rather than building to a climax, and one hopes that the story has been deliberately weighted more heavily at the bottom end to give it a satisfying conclusion. If that’s the case, then this leisurely but emotive drama is certainly worth persevering with.

Aired at 9pm on Monday 3rd September 2012 on ITV1.

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