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2 hours ago
3
Sometimes three-in-one type things are good. Phone chargers with lots of leads for all your devices that have stupidly different ports. Those woolly hats that cover your neck and lower face, so you look daft but are impregnable to winter cold. The Nars blusher stick that is also a lipstick and eyeshadow.
When it comes to dramas, however, it’s best to stick to one field of endeavour. The Revenge Club is a gallimaufry of tones, styles and performances. Watching it is like looking through a kaleidoscope that someone twists for you every few minutes; it’s fun but quite disorienting after a while.
The club of the title begins as a divorce therapy group, comprising six pained souls. First among grieving equals is Emily (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), a happy and successful thirtysomething until she found her husband in bed with her best friend. The treacherous pair now have a baby, live in Emily’s beloved former home and bought her business for peanuts when she became unable to work in the wake of the disaster. We meet Emily in a now-standard flash-forward scene being interviewed by the police because “people are dead”. Dum-dum-dah! “It all started with the group,” she says, and – Big Little Lies style – every episode begins with a new member being interviewed and further interrogation scenes are interwoven with the main action, dropping crumbs of information as they go. It’s enough to keep you hooked even after you realise too many of the characters are ciphers, the main action is preposterous but that the brutal misery of divorce is somehow perfectly evoked and underlies every moment. It makes you want to cry even as you laugh in disbelief at the shenanigans unfolding.
Martin Compston plays Callum, a father whose ex-wife is a real piece of work and trying to turn the wean against him by giving him the wrong times and dates for her school shows and so on. He and Emily come from one kind of show – standard thriller – and soon have the hots for each other. I’m sure nothing can go wrong there.
Then there’s the ex-sergeant major Steven, whose wife “went mad at 40” and kicked him out. He lives in a caravan in their-now-her driveway, watching her come and go with her new man. His bitterness is brilliantly played by Douglas Henshall but seems to come from a much darker show altogether. He is the main driver of the group’s adventures – at first lighthearted, involving rats down chimneys and discombobulating the woman who took your house and usefully believes in ghosts, karma and the rest – into taking revenge on their exes.
Tej (Chaneil Kular) is a relative youngster, whose divorce seems to have stemmed from the loss of their first baby at birth, though his vengeful attitude suggests something more at work. He belongs in the same show as Steven.
Rita (Meera Syal) is a middle-aged woman who is sick of being invisible. Even the group leader overlooks her during introductions. A simmering mass of … well, everything, she could have her own show and it could be anything from a cartoonish journey through her serial-killing years to an award-winning portrait of a woman coming undone. Which it is will depend how much of a role goes to HRT.
Finally, there’s another youngster, Rachel (Sharon Rooney, a natural comic actor), who has a rich daddy, two children and secret she is hiding from the group. She comes from a dramedy, at least at first.
Leading them all is Malcolm (Amit Shah), licensed therapist, Sagittarius and divorce survivor, talks about himself in the third person and comes from a comedy I would watch.
After the therapy session, the group reconvenes in the pub and begins its evolution into a tool for vengeance, retribution, restorative justice and all manner of come-uppery. Alas, what begins as a cathartic joke gradually morphs into something bigger and more dangerous – until, we must assume, it leads to corpses and police interrogations.
As Christmas filler, The Revenge Club fulfils its duties. It’s entertaining, there’s always something happening and although preposterous, essentially makes narrative and emotional sense. But if it could have been more certain of itself, decided early on whether it was a caper or a thriller or a psychological drama about what extremes the effects of betrayal and grief can bring us to it could, as any one of them, have been really good.
