Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton, Debbie Rush, Gaby French, Bobby Schofield, Olly Hudson-Croker.
The secret kept behind closed doors is the one that can either bring a family together, or break it, completely fracture it to the point where the joints will never be truly aligned once more. Whilst television normally glorifies in the fall out of such family despair, whilst film praises the pain in family disfunction, what cannot be argued with is how resilience and love can make for a finer interpretation of what family means, that even in the darkest moment, Love’s Great Adventure is there to prove that drama is only a side show to a truth of expression that is forgiveness and battling the enemies at the gate together.
The prevailing attraction of the kitchen sink drama that dominated television in its early golden years has never truly departed from the medium or the writer’s conscious, many reasons are to be found in such a way of way of presenting those who inhabit this world, some of whom wish to portray the so called working class family as one of dysfunctional, of lacking morals and behaviour that is reminiscent of that extended family shown to crawl through life at the behest of Fagin in Dickens’ insightful novel, Oliver Twist.
The reality, as wonderfully presented by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton in the Inside No. 9 episode, Love’s Great Adventure is that whilst there are undoubted hard times, whilst there are families who need desperate help because of Government neglect and social attitudes, it is love that prevails, that the drama of the moment, of a wayward adult child bringing terror into the house, that these actions can be solved, normally by sticking together, by facing the problem as a team. It might not make for the disaster drama of the estate that television and film love to portray as a proof of the decline of society, but it is a far more accurate picture of what goes on behind the closed doors of Britain.
With an excellent performance by Bobby Schofield as wayward son Patrick, and a touching portrayal of the cost on what it sometimes means to be a father by Steve Pemberton, Love’s Great Adventure is as close to real life as we can ask of television; in an age of salaciousness and the boot against the face to which we have all become victims, such a piece of writing captured on screen is to be hailed as ultimately heroic.
Ian D. Hall