I am genuinely and continually amazed with the calibre of talent that Banana has showcased so wonderfully each week.
I already admired Charlie Covell for the writing in Helen’s story earlier in the season, and am delighted to see her step in front of the camera as well for this episode.
Covell plays Amy, a young woman whose imagination becomes the cause of near-constant worry: leaving the house in the morning, she feels a twinge of uncertainty about whether her toaster was switched off at the main, envisioning the death and devastation amid the smouldering ruins of her building, and runs home to check. It is after saving a man from a terrible imagined death by informing him that his shoelace is untied that she receives a message from Kay (T’Nia Miller), asking for a date.
So wonderfully sweet are these two together that I genuinely despaired when it seemed that Kay had given up and left when Amy disappeared into the ladies’ loo to let her mother know about her tattoo – you know, just in case her dead body ever needed to be identified. When they kissed, I may have shed a tear of joy.
I like Amy in part because I see something of myself in her – for instance, in lieu of replacing my pedometer, I once counted every step I took for a month, and refused to stop on anything but a round number, even if it meant awkwardly pacing my office a few times – but I also have so much hope for her burgeoning relationship with Kay.
We see a lot of Amy’s inner world – her obsessive-compulsive habits, her anxieties – but through the course of her date, we also get to experience more fully what Kay sees in her: a bright, funny, beautiful person with such a tremendous heart that she’d seek out a missing Big Issue seller to make sure he gets her two quid.
Covell and Miller play their respective roles with such wit and warmth and truth that it made my heart do backflips. I really hope that Amy and Kay stick together, and somehow I feel like they will.
Aired at 10pm on Thursday 26 February 2015 on E4.
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