Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Daisy Haggard, Geraldine James, Richard Durden, Liam Williams, Jamie Michie, Adeel Akhtar, Christine Bottomley, Frank Feys, Imogen Gurney, Jo Martin, Souad Feress, Jennifer Tollady, Rhona Cameron, Angus Kennedy, Juliet Cowan, Jade Harrison, Celia Henebury.
It takes a special kind of relationship between a writer and their possible audience to make any connection with comedy work, especially when it is one that is set against the backdrop of murder and the after-effects of the accused being released from prison.
Few television programmes have been able to make that leap with any success, after all there is nothing remotely funny about the act of murder, and yet perhaps we have been looking at it the wrong way round, that we have been trained to think that once released into the community a former prisoner has no right to life at all, that the pact made with society for their release is one in which demands squalor and continued harassment.
Daisy Haggard’s Back To Life takes that thought one step further, part mystery, part dark comedy, it shows how the system is skewed against people returning to their home towns when they have served their time. It also shows that there are various degrees of murder, some disgusting and intolerable to even the warped imaginations that some hold dear, and the ones in which the crime in which the person has been found guilty of, is not always as black and white as many with secrets of their own would believe.
Miri Matteson killed her best friend, an 18-year-old girl who it seems was the one who provoked the situation, but because of circumstance it was Miri who paid the long price of jail. It is in this premise that the audience is asked what constitutes realistic and appropriate measures against someone who had no history of trouble before, and who would not be involved with such actions again, especially when taken into context of those who habitually cause damage on society and who would kill without a second thought.
It is the reception that Miri faces when she returns home that sets the tone of the series, the preconceptions that people face, the damage willing to be done against property, against the person, that is the most telling; they become scapegoats to their own past. Daisy Haggard portrays this guilt of emotions with finesse and alongside the redoubtable Geraldine James as her mother Caroline, the impressive Richard Durden as her father Oscar, and the regret filled Mandy, played by Christine Bottomley, the realisation that we see every crime committed through the same narrow viewpoint of revenge by society is one that is a concern.
It takes courage to change people’s minds about a subject, if it can be done by raising a smile then for the better society might have a chance of becoming. Back To Life may have bleak overtones but its heart is in the right place, by raising awareness to a common situation, it opens up the point of debate, something that a good television series should be able to do.
Ian D. Hall