I’m not sure where Aimee Lou Wood – the Stockport-born star of Sex Education and The White Lotus – got the idea for Film Club (Tuesday 7 October, 10pm, BBC Three), the new drama she has created with fellow actor Ralph Davis, but I’d be amazed if it’s drawn from her own life. Not because the fearlessly outspoken global celebrity plays a woman too scared to set foot outside her mum’s house in Manchester following a nervous breakdown, her only respite being a weekly movie night with uni friends in the garage. No. It’s the garage itself.
Each week, unemployed, agoraphobic Evie somehow finds the wherewithal to transform her garage into a spectacular film set. For a screening of Alien, this one-woman Secret Cinema wallpapers it with tinfoil and hazard tape and fills it with smoke, strip lights and acres of aluminium ducting. For The Wizard of Oz, it’s floor-to-ceiling emerald gauze, gingham curtains and dozens of human head-sized flowers. For The Shawshank Redemption, bars, laundry and personalised prison-style posters line the walls. I simply refuse to believe such breathtakingly wasteful party decor would ever appear in an actual British household. America, maybe. Britain? Not. A. Chance.
