TV review, Doctor Foster (BBC1): We viewers get the psychodrama we deserve

Plus: Sex, Chips and Poetry: 50 Years of the Mersey Sound (BBC4)

The twister: Tom Foster (played by Tom Taylor) ‘took back control’ in the denouement of ‘Doctor Foster’ (BBC)

In end, then, they all survived. Sort of. That was the “twist” we were all promised in Doctor Foster, though I’m not sure this qualifies as quite the classic “Medea” ending to this timeless story of a woman scorned.

The son, Tom, in a twist on the twist, doesn’t end up dead, as the traditional plot might have it, but disappeared, run away from his bitterly divorced parents, Gemma (the eponymous doctor, played by Suranne Jones) and Simon (Bertie Carvel). Thus they are left with the prospect of endless, dull, constant unresolved emotional pain – his retribution upon them for all they did to what was once a family. Justice was done.

For so long used as an instrument of emotional blackmail, hence tired of being begged, fooled, lied to, cajoled, threatened, bribed or bullied into siding with one side or the other, Tom, at 15, took it upon himself to “take back control”, as the fashionable phrase has it. You really couldn’t blame the poor lad. Their bitter fights were never about how much they loved him, but about how much they hated each other. Their divorce turned into war for the sake of war, a common enough feature ever since Henry VIII invented this flawed institution. Anyone who has been through such a separation, or witnessed such at close quarters, will recognise the extraordinary emotions than can be roiled in ordinary people. That, I think, is why Doctor Foster worked so well.

This denouement only came when Tom had finally managed to find himself disillusioned with his dad as well as his mum. Tom Taylor, who bears an odd resemblance to an extremely young Anthony Andrews, carried it all off brilliantly, telling the truth, to his scheming, vain, but ultimately weak father: “The only way you got through life is by lying to yourself, ’cause if you stopped you’d realise e you’re a massive failure.”

The fact that three of them, plus supporting cast of lovers and others, were all still alive also rather tantalisingly leaves open the theoretical possibility of a third run of Doctor Foster. Yet I doubt even the great talents of writer Mike Bartlett nor the directorial skills of Jeremy Lovering are quite prodigious enough for the task.

Nor, I think, could our nerves handle it. There were certainly points when it wasn’t Gemma, Tom or Simon who was being emotionally shredded, but us lot, the poor old viewers. It wasn’t explained why Gemma left her ex with three syringes with which to end his life – so our minds raced towards the notion of some three-way suicide pact at the local travel tavern. Nor was there any need for a decoy car accident to suggest, terrifyingly, that Tom had thrown himself into a busy road. Nor, I suggest, for Doctor Foster to regale her “family” with the details of the double decapitation her parents suffered in a car accident when she was 16.

Anyway, I guess that we viewers get what we deserve, in one sense, in that the current fashion for psychodramas must be pandering to some national mood of masochism. Thus the creators of these stories have little choice but to inflict pornographic emotional traumas on all concerned, if that’s how to win the ratings and the Baftas.

Now that Doctor Foster has finished, may I suggest you take the opportunity to catch the extensive coverage, recorded and live, of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, which you can find on the excellent BBC Parliament channel? There, as their Scottish leader Ruth Davidson pointed out, is a real life psychodrama populated by some of the most mendacious, murderous, manipulative creatures ever to have despoiled God’s green earth. This week sees Philip Hammond and Boris Johnson use psychological warfare to gain custody of their love child, the Brexit Transition Period. (The twist here being that Michel Barnier won’t let either of them have it). Grisly stuff, but gripping, if you’ve got the nerves for it.

Always up for some enlightenment, I am grateful to the BBC for in introducing me, lamentably late I confess, to the Mersey Sound. Not, as the producers hastened to point out, “that” Mersey Sound, but the poetic one, and in particular the 1967 Penguin classic of that title that broke the beatnik on the Mersey thing.

In Sex, Chips and Poetry: 50 Years of the Mersey Sound the enduring legacy of this anthology of the likes of Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten is still in print, though I am not sure I’ve ever read it, which I probably would have remembered, as I recall vividly being force fed Ted Hughes, Keats and Chaucer at school (and nothing wrong with those guys, by the way).

I can’t compete with those eloquent Scousers, and they can speak eloquently for themselves, so, as Mark Kermode always says, here’s a clip from Perrin’s modern love poetry, apparently written on the back of a packet of Woodbines:

Let us not hesitate
Over what we know
Or over how cold this place has become,
But let’s unclip our minds
And let tumble free
The mad, mangled crocodile of love.

How’s that for a chat-up line, missus, as that other Scouse poet, Ken Dodd, might ask?