What is Gone? Easier, maybe, to checklist the issues that Gone isn’t, if solely to provide ourselves one thing to cling to when the extra acquainted trappings start to wobble, fault traces seem and every little thing begins sliding right into a pit of churning unease.
So! Some issues that Gone isn’t: a sitcom, a musical, a cooking present introduced by sockless males with forearms like hams, a factor about whales, Richard Osman’s House of Games. Yes, George “Hijack” Kay’s six-part sequence is ostensibly against the law drama about the disappearance of the well-heeled spouse of a non-public faculty headteacher. But this is merely the gross sales pitch to get it by the entrance door; behind the blandishments squirm a large number of wrigglier, trickier issues. Things equivalent to the nature of guilt and co-dependence, the burden {of professional} expectation, preoccupied schoolboys, the banality of evil and unusually massive dalmatians uncovering corpses in glades (“Casper …?! OH GOD”). It is an exceedingly rum do: an enormous, confounding and shrewdly elusive factor. Every hideously tense second is weighted with the sense that one thing Profound and/or Awful is about to rear up from the bracken and thwack us in our preconceptions.
To Bristol, then, the place a faculty rugby match is in full swing, the digital camera flitting between a forest of straining thighs as St Bartholomew’s stiff-backed headteacher Michael Polly (David Morrissey) watches expressionlessly from the sidelines. Michael’s staff wins: huzzah! But what’s this? The trainer seems curiously unmoved by the boys’ victory and is equally unbothered when, later that afternoon, he discovers that his spouse Sarah is lacking from their chocolate field cottage.
Night falls. Still no Sarah. Daughter Alana (Emma Appleton) grows distraught. “Dad,” she says hesitantly. “I’m getting frightened. Did you, did you … argue?” Silence.
“We didn’t argue,” he lastly replies, his again turned. A clock ticks. The chasm widens. “We never do.”
The police are ultimately, reluctantly, knowledgeable.
“How are you coping?” asks watchful, dry-witted DS Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles). “You seem … very calm.”
“I have 160 pupils about to sit exams,” replies Michael. “Those predicted grades will determine which universities they go to. The fact that their headmaster’s wife has not been seen for 24 hours shouldn’t concern them.”
Annie narrows her eyes. “I mean,” she later muses to a colleague, “there’s a lot that’s not right there.”
There actually is. But what? Guilt? Or a model of self-control that has, absolutely, gone the manner of the dinosaurs? Fastidious Michael, along with his prewar haircut and neatly pressed waistcoat, is firmly, crisply unreadable. Not a clean, precisely (this is, in any case, David Morrissey; few actors can do extra with a fleeting nostril-twitch), however very a lot a closed e book. Great pains have been taken to hammer shut his emotional vault; Michael has very probably smothered it in garlic earlier than sealing it in lead. He appears oblivious to the discomfort of these round him. Or is this merely one other type of management? “He’s a headmaster,” observes Annie’s gloriously rumpled, seen-it-all buddy Carol (the ever-wonderful Clare Higgins). “He’ll be used to getting it all his own way.”
“Hmm,” replies Annie, who has additionally seen (and, certainly, cohabited with) the sort earlier than. Talking of which, right here comes charming ex Craig (Peter McDonald), whose efforts to win again Annie will not be as chipper as they seem.
Other issues occur. Schoolboy Dylan (Billy Barratt) appears burdened by one thing. A chilly case involving a lacking teenager re-emerges from the previous. There are lingering aerial pictures of dense woodland: not the frequent type, with its fly-tipped bogs, however the well-to-do type; the type the place dog-walkers wave to 1 one other and the corpses have the decency to put on Barbour.
Gone makes us work for our supper. Clues arrive at the desk slowly and from sudden angles. Stuff turns up and – twang – our preconceptions are as soon as once more catapulted into the nearest thicket (be careful, Casper!)
Suspense builds, continues to construct, after which – the stress! – builds some extra. How lengthy earlier than the elastic snaps again? “Not telling,” tee-hees Gone, waving extra horrible issues at us earlier than scampering again into the undergrowth.
If there’s a tauter, clammier or extra engrossing drama this year I’ll eat my mortarboard with chips.
