Touchingly free of cynicism: C4’s Somewhere Boy reviewed

At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following his father’s suicide – and what she, the police and social services regard as a lifetime of abuse. Since he was small, Danny’s father, Sam, had forbidden him from going outside, telling him the world was full of monsters who’d kill him if he did. He’d therefore grown up listening to old songs and watching old films – all the while believing that his beloved dad was keeping him safe.

Yet once Danny was installed in Sue’s house, sharing a bedroom with his cousin Aaron, it soon became clear that this was by no means a simple tale of parental cruelty. As the flashbacks demonstrated, Danny’s devoted but mentally ill father really did think he was acting in his son’s best interests. The reason for his mental illness was portrayed sympathetically too. When Danny was a boy, Sam’s wife had been killed by a hit and run driver. ‘I lost your mum to a monster, Danny,’ Sam explained. ‘I’m not going to lose you too.’

As this might suggest, what unfolded over the next four nights was often desperately sad. But it was also tender, thoughtful, occasionally funny and full of unforced nuance. The result was a programme so original that it made you realise afresh just how formulaic so much TV drama is, with even the best shows being those that play most deftly with their chosen formula – usually, of course, crime.

Somewhere Boy, by contrast, retained an unselfconscious strangeness that made it impossible to categorise. While its realism never failed to be realistic, it also had intriguing elements of fable – or, more accurately, of several different fables, perhaps including Covid lockdown.

What parent, for example, doesn’t want to protect their child from the horrors of the world? Or can be guaranteed to recognise the damage they’re doing when they know they’re motivated by love? What child wants to see an apparently (or genuinely) loving parent as a malign force?

The same sense of fable applied as Danny emerged into the world: at first bewildered by the absence of monsters, and then by the presence of so much else, from teenage parties to internet pornography. (As he told an incredulous Aaron, his own masturbatory fantasies centred around Edna Purviance in Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris.) On his debut trip to the pub, he did what he’d learned from those old movies and ordered a martini.

Meanwhile, Pete Jackson’s script took a similarly compassionate approach to everyone else involved: Sue, filled with guilt at her failure to save her brother; her husband Paul doing his clumsy best to connect with Aaron, his stepson; and especially Aaron himself, who in his own way was as lost as Danny. Except that in his case his loneliness stemmed from a father who’d abandoned him rather than one who’d stuck too close. (Aaron’s father, in fact, was the nearest we got to a baddie.)

You could, I suppose, argue that the show’s fundamental kindliness led to an ending that, after all the heartbreakingly intractable sadness, was improbably happy. To do so, though, you’d have to hold on tight to a cynicism of which Somewhere Boy itself was so touchingly and infectiously free.

And from there it’s quite a handbrake turn to Gangs of London, which made a welcome return this week. Here, the damage the characters inflict on each other is not only far from inadvertent, but it’s also shown in famously lurid detail.

Thus, after a ‘Previously’ section consisting largely of a series of hideous deaths, the first new episode of two opened with a sequence not unlike that Monty Python parody of Sam Peckinpah, as lots of people staggered around spurting blood. Another was then strangled to death in eye-popping close-up (the victim’s eyes that is, not ours).

And with that, it was pretty much as you were. In an impressively multicultural London – or ‘this city’ as most of the characters prefer to call it – Algerians, Albanians, Irish, Georgians, Pakistanis and Somalis fought each other for the right to buy guns from whomsoever they chose. And this, despite the mysterious ‘investors’ insisting that everybody goes through their new enforcer Koba, whose tactics you can probably guess. (Clue: they feature plenty of masked blokes with large axes.)

Given that Gangs of London goes out on a Thursday, I won’t say a great deal about the plot – except that some of the actors who signed up for series two didn’t sign up for much of it. I can also reveal that while the dialogue is still no stranger to cliché, everything else – the acting, the London settings, the cinematography and, let’s face it, all that gratuitous violence – provides as irresistible an adrenaline rush as ever.