Last Tango in Halifax, review: Understated laughs and intense anguish make this drama’s long-awaited return a triumph

Sally Wainwright's series returns after a four-year hiatus with an enjoyable and exhilarating first episode

Last Tango in Halifax has returned for its fifth series and a defiantly robust return it is too. The fractious four central characters are back, I’m pleased to say, and they and the writer (Sally Wainwright) have once again resisted the temptation to descend into any sort of saccharine sentimentality. It is not, as it might have become, Emmerdale with superior scripts, or evolved into Last of the Summer Wine with more sex.

Gentle, generous, Guardian-reading Alan (Derek Jacobi) is still married to the ill-natured Daily Mail subscriber Celia (Ann Reid), with no sign of their unlikely relationship uncoupling. These pensioners, once childhood sweethearts, stumbled across one another on Facebook and decided to get back together again. That was in 2013, and there’s no sign of any seven-year itch. The relationship is the axis around which all else turns, and a rare example of television elevating older folk into something a bit more than just wrinkly props for a ridicule. Their respective daughters Caroline (Celia’s, played by Sarah Lancashire) and Gillian (Nicola Walker) are still discomfited by their new, unwonted, situation. Apart from that and a common birthday, successful headteacher Caroline has little in common with with struggling sheep farmer Gillian. They in turn have kids, lovers and complications of their own.

The new series brings some promising developments. Alan tries to get a job on the tills at a supermarket, much to snob Ann’s horror, and strikes up a friendship with a juvenile shoplifter. Caroline, who lost a partner in the last series finds herself attracted to a school colleague (Ruth, played by rising star Lu Corfield), with all the conflicts that will surely generate. Conflicts including those with her rotten ex husband John (Tony Gardner) who has been asked by his loaded but alcoholic novelist girlfriend (Ronni Ancona) to marry her (unclear why).

Most exciting, though, is the sudden return, of Alan’s brother Ted (Timothy West, still a joy to watch). Back from New Zealand, he arrives in the rural West Riding of Yorkshire with early signs of dementia plus two unidentified hippyish females he’s picked up somewhere along his 11,000 mile journey.

You shouldn’t really go far wrong with so much acting talent concentrated into a one hour episode, and you don’t. The laughs are understated and the drama and anguish are always tendered the more intense for being set against the invariably picturesque, comfortable surroundings these mostly well-heeled people live in. Even a cosy family get-together at Gillian’s nice old farmhouse is turned into an emotional bombing raid when Celia tells Gillian she that can’t borrow five grand from Alan to fix her roof, because as Celia tells her step-daughter in front of the gathered generations of the families: “This is you all over, Gillian. Manipulating your dad. I mean, never mind the fact that I have all my life been a saver so that I can take things a bit easier and have a few nice things. No. We have to bail you out. You who doesn’t think beyond next week and never has.”

I’m with Celia, as it happens, in this outbreak of inter-generational warfare; but it would have been a very dull watch indeed if Celia had gone all warm-hearted, caved, and handed Gillian the cash out of pity. The tango is a an enjoyable and exhilarating sort of dance, but a difficult one too.