What is Gone? Easier, perhaps, to list the things that Gone is not, if only to give ourselves something to cling to when the more familiar trappings begin to wobble, fault lines appear and everything starts sliding into a pit of churning unease.
So! Some things that Gone is not: a sitcom, a musical, a cooking show presented by sockless men with forearms like hams, a thing about whales, Richard Osman’s House of Games. Yes, George “Hijack” Kay’s six-part series is ostensibly a crime drama about the disappearance of the well-heeled wife of a private school headteacher. But this is merely the sales pitch to get it through the front door; behind the blandishments squirm a multitude of wrigglier, trickier things. Things such as the nature of guilt and co-dependence, the burden of professional expectation, preoccupied schoolboys, the banality of evil and unusually large dalmatians uncovering corpses in glades (“Casper …?! OH GOD”). It is an exceedingly rum do: a huge, confounding and shrewdly elusive thing. Every hideously tense second is weighted with the sense that something Profound and/or Awful is about to rear up from the bracken and thwack us in our preconceptions.
