The utter misery of BBC’s Marriage

‘Who are these people and why should we care about them?' This is the most important question any screenwriter must ask before committing pen to paper. Sadly it's a question I failed to come anywhere near answering during the interminable 'realism' of the BBC’s much discussed (and much praised) Marriage.

Sean Bean and Nicola Walker play Ian and Emma, an uptight midlife couple caught in the tedium of marital graft after 27 years together. The four-part 'drama' has been widely commended for showing the profound inanity of ordinary people's domestic lives. While I consider myself to be pretty ordinary, I failed to recognise either of these dullards as anything other than famous actors trying to appear real and failing miserably. And by miserably I mean wrist-slittingly, Beachy-Head-jumpingly so. This is kitchen sink drama from the plughole's perspective.

The couple bicker their way through an endless grind of household chores and work travails. Emma is half-heartedly pursuing her caddish boss, the excellent Henry Lloyd-Hughes, while jealous hubby pads around the couple's sterile kitchen in a pair of unbecoming trackie bottoms, brooding over his recent redundancy (well, he is white and middle-aged after all). Even the young dudes at his local gym are embarrassed to be seen in the same room as him.

Over the course of four episodes we learn that the couple have lost a child. But what should have been a moving revelation feels more like a heavy-handed device to hammer home the writer's disdain for emotionally constipated middle-class types – ‘Look, they don't even know how to grieve properly’. By now I'd become so incensed by the boringness of these non-characters that even their tragic loss left me cold.

I'm all for touching insights into human frailty, but at least offer us well-rounded characters we can root for. This felt more like one of those patronising undergrad examinations of how 'little people' live. Both Walker and Marriage's writer Stefan Golaszewski (creator of Mum) are ex-Cambridge Footlights, and it shows in the script's unrealistic take on social realism. Walker's accent was all over the place – Estuary-light one minute, Cambridge-posh the next – while Bean hams up his 'I'm a proper northerner ye know' shtick by mumbling all his lines. I just didn’t buy these two as a married couple.

The clunky script is replete with stagey pauses, stilted dialogue, misplaced luvvie-style guffaws and a predictable overuse of swearing. Emma's f-ing and blinding grates not because it's shocking, but because it makes her sound more like one of those glamorous potty-mouthed actors (think Kate Winslet) than a respectable lower middle-class working mother. But I sense the writer already knew this and was deliberately trying to upset the very same demographic he had chosen to satirise. For make no mistake, Marriage is a takedown of the sort of provincial, middle-class small ‘c’ conservatism that the media set detests. That quiet stoicism born out of polite restraint is antithetical to coarse progressivism's demand that we shout about our feelings and hang the consequences.

But the creator doesn’t give up on his dreary, unenlightened protagonists. Salvation comes in the form of Jessica, the couple's adopted Afro-Caribbean daughter, who shows staid old mum and dad how relationships ought to be done by ditching her starchy white boyfriend Adam and shacking up with Mark, an emotionally connected mixed-race urban hipster who knows all about 'keeping it real'. Mark thinks we should all just tell each other how we really feel and everything will be fine – he even apologises for saying Jessica is beautiful in case she finds the term objectifying.

Mark may have a point about our lack of openness, but the writer seems to forget that the sort of English reticence he so obviously loathes is intrinsic to who we are as a nation, just as fieriness is to the Spanish. Can you imagine a Latino drama in which young characters try to convince their parents to be less passionate? The message here is both insultingly stereotypical and way too obvious, with speechifying riffs that sound stagey and hectoring. The younger cast members in particular struggle to get beyond Grange Hill levels of am-dram-ham, while the leads are too well known to be convincing.

And if you are going to attempt social realism, why not cast the real deal? Bean's Hollywood-approved handsome face and gleaming white gnashers is a distraction; even his Sheffield accent sounds exaggerated as though he's trying to make a point. I kept expecting him to morph into one of those snarling baddies he portrays in movies. Similarly, Walker's equally perfect teeth, wistfully intelligent face and brittle tone hardly speak of an ordinary woman crushed by life's disappointments.

Working-class filmmaker Shane Meadows has shown you don’t need to cast attractive, well-known actors to engage an audience in the minutiae of everyday life. If only Golaszewski had followed Meadows's rigorous attention to how people actually behave, we might have had an interesting story with recognisable, well-rounded characters.

But none of the drama here felt rooted in any recognisable reality. The irritatingly cacophonous slam-poetry style title music was straight out of the National Theatre's playbook on how to alienate middle-class audiences with avant-garde tosh. And don’t tell me that Jessica's celebration of difference speech in front of a child's drawing of a rainbow wasn’t deliberate.

It's a tragedy that in the UK we no longer make intelligent dramas that reflect who we are as a nation. On the rare occasions we manage it, they tend to be steeped in ideology or skewed by the cult of urban diversity. This is a real loss for our sense of identity; every society needs to be able to hold a mirror up to itself occasionally, if only to remind ourselves we still exist. Marriage felt like another missed opportunity by our national broadcaster to fulfil its remit to educate, inform and entertain. I sense irreconcilable differences. Time for a divorce?