Coma
Nothing defines your social standing more clearly than the way you choose to enjoy a bottle of vino after dinner.
Perhaps you order a bottle of Argentinian Malbec, ‘the good stuff,’ for a heart-to-heart with a pal at a wine bar.
Or maybe you just nick a litre of Buckfast from the off-licence, drink it with your teenage mates in a playpark and leave broken glass everywhere.
If you’re the harassed hero of a domestic thriller, you might pick up a cheap red and a cheaper white at the supermarket, knock them both back while gossiping with your partner and snacking on fish fingers, then retire upstairs for a woozy fumble.
That’s what Simon Henderson and his wife Beth (Jason Watkins and Claire Skinner) do, to escape their daily stresses in the four-part domestic thriller Coma (Ch5).
Jason Watkins stars as Simon Henderson in the four-part domestic thriller Coma (Ch5)
She’s a nurse, he’s just been made redundant from his sales job, the mortgage is overdue, and their suburban neighbourhood is being terrorised by a gang of hoodies — that bunch from the park.
Simon has had a few run-ins with the yobbos. He tried to intervene as they battered a homeless man.
Later, one of them, a scrawny lad called Jordan, started taunting him, showing up at his door and scaring his young daughter.
When Jordan’s threats turn nasty, Simon lashes out — landing a punch that leaves the youth in a coma.
Hence the title, in case you thought it was a reference to Coma Vella, a Spanish vino well out of Simon’s usual price range.
And the Argie Malbec? That’s favoured by Jordan’s dad, Paul (Jonas Armstrong), a menacing Scouser who describes himself as a ‘full-time gangster’.
When drinking red wine, Paul advises, go for the expensive stuff — it’s lower in acid, apparently, which means gentler hangovers.
Mind you, after half a bottle, Paul spots a bloke he doesn’t like and, following him into the gents’, beats him senseless. Evidently, a couple too many glugs of South America’s finest can bring out a fellow’s aggressive side.
Simon has a few run-ins with the yobbos. He tries to intervene as they battered a homeless man
Paul doesn’t know that Simon put his boy in hospital. Like the police and the local paper, he believes the lad was the victim of an unknown assailant — and that the mild-mannered family man saved his life by giving him first aid. Keeping up this pretence is making Simon quite anxious.
No one does mild-mannered and anxious better than Jason Watkins, and that’s one of this serial’s deficiencies. It feels predictable, a morality play with a cast of stereotypes.
If Watkins played the vengeful gangster, with Armstrong as the nervous nelly driven to breaking point, that could have made for a more intriguing drama.
The other problem is Beth. Claire Skinner is wasted as the overworked nurse, making her daughter’s tea before taking on more overtime.
Her chief role is to give Simon reassurance that men don’t have to be the sole breadwinners any more, before saying: ‘Shall we open another bottle?’
If we followed the story through her eyes, it might be better — though we’d probably be seeing double.
Jason WatkinsHomelessness
