TV Review, Come Home (BBC1): An inevitably mundane climax to a gut-wrenching story

Christopher Eccleston and cast bring this fine drama to a close without fireworks. Plus, Made in Yorkshire with John Prescott (Channel 5)

Christopher Eccleston stars in a series that has dealt deftly with every pressure exerted on modern family life (Red Productions)

Come Home came home with a concluding episode that would, I’d have thought, make any sequel fairly pointless, and which, indeed, threatened to devalue the whole drama.

To recap, this three-part series concerned itself with a family being torn apart, and the inevitable traumas inflicted on all concerned – mum (Paula Malcolmson), abandoned dad (Christopher Eccleston) and the kids – and even on some people not particularly concerned.

As the episodes ground on, we discovered he was very controlling and wanted her to be a substitute for his own mother, a “slave”; he fooled her into having another child by faking a vasectomy; and that she herself had had an undeclared affair that meant his middle child was not his. He, on the other hand, after the separation took up with another manipulative woman (Kerri Quinn) with a violent husband in tow, and moved her and her kid into the family home. They all drank too much, they all had too much casual sex, and they all ended up in court.

It was quite a gut-wrenching journey for the viewer, too, and the eldest child (Liam, played by the promising Anthony Boyle) put the dilemma best: for him and his sibling sit was about choosing between “the bitch that waked out versus the bitch who moved in”.

The emotional stuff was moving, and the series dealt deftly with virtually every pressure exerted on modern family life. From postnatal depression through infidelity, alcoholism, app-enabled sexual encounters in pub bogs and, to be fair, plenty of parental love and compassion, it was a virtual handbook for any trainee marriage guidance counsellor.

The dramatic tension was maintained almost to the end by a fine cast and some elegant writing and direction. It was, then, a bit of a pity that the whole mad story ended with a truly prosaic denouement – a family judge stating that the kids could stay with their mum during the week and their dad at weekends. That was anti-climactic and, though entirely routine in such cases, I was hoping (albeit foolishly, or pruriently) for something a bit more, well, dramatic. Abduction, mass murder, a siege, maybe. But no, what we got was two lawyers arguing the toss and a sensible compromise from the beak.

‘And some of them are this long!’ – John Prescott discusses processed meat at the Heck factory, Yorkshire (Channel 5)

The trouble with family breakdown as a basis for a drama is that it is overwhelmingly a boringly predictable and routine process – emotionally painful, yes, financially ruinous and endlessly destructive, of course, with all manner of possible chimerical outcomes glimpsed by the confused participants as they try to navigate their way through it all, but with the grim inevitability of a cold legal document handed down to them with which to map out the rest of their lives.

Made in Yorkshire with John Prescott is a pretty random bit of TV. I have always liked Prescott, even admired him, at least politically. Rather underestimated I always thought; authentic; witty; and a terrible victim of class snobbery. (His personal life, I agree, was another matter.)

If you want to know what he’s up to these days, then Channel 5 gives us a bit of a glimpse and, according to this, he seems to be enjoying life in semi-retirement, still driving a Jag (though a baby-sized one these days) and, for our benefit and his, “finding the secret of how some of our favourite foods are made”, ie the ones that come from God’s Own County. Prescott was actually born in Wales, but we’ll let that slide.

I did wonder whether it was entirely wise for old Prezza to have been filmed at the Heck sausage factory in Kirklington, somewhere full of opportunities for smutty innuendo, as well as minced pork. After all, not so very long ago, Prescott’s ex-lover said that the deputy prime ministerial manhood resembled a “cocktail sausage”. Chipolatagate is something I’ve never thing that I’ve never quite been able to expunge from my memory, and I doubt Baron Prescott has either.

Dressed as he was for a food factory in the regulation hairnet, he looked like a cross between Ena Sharples and Les Dawson, and I am sure that I detected a mischievous smile playing around his lips as he gave his verdict on the sausage machine: “At the end of the day the sausage depends on the kind of quality of meat you’ve got and how you deal with it in the process”. Couldn’t have put it better myself, John.

Next week: Prescott, who once, bravely, confessed to suffering from bulimia nervosa, visits a factory that makes two million pork pies a year. I don’t think there’s anything I can usefully add at this stage.