The opening minutes of Marriage (BBC One) could be accused of pulling a fast one. Sean Bean and Nicola Walker, two surefire indicators of good-quality British TV, are married couple Ian and Emma. We meet them as they wait at the airport for their flight home, after a holiday in Spain. The first real line of dialogue is “I had to pay for the ketchup”, and they bicker over whether Emma should have asked the man at the cafe if he would make a jacket potato for Ian, despite it looking as if they only sold chips.
Opening with a low-stakes row about potatoes, and the fact that Marriage comes from the pen of Stefan Golaszewski, creator of Him & Her and Mum, suggests that this will be about finding wry humour in the mundane reality of a long-term relationship. Emma and Ian talk about dodgy tummies and who will pick up the parcel that has been left with a nextdoor neighbour. They watch TV and tease each other about the state of their pants. There’s nothing wrong with the mundane, as Golaszewski’s previous shows have proved again and again. Plenty of people tune in to watch Gogglebox every week, and that’s just us watching people watching telly. Done well, it can be a voyeuristic treat.
The light touch is deceptive, though, and Marriage soon reveals that it won’t quite be the gentle series it first appears. All the characters in the couple’s lives talk to each other in cliches and platitudes. They stick to the script of human communication, politely indulging in small talk, while hardly ever daring to say what they truly mean. Emma has an oddly excruciating chat with her younger, smarmy boss Jamie about what a risk it is to buy clothes online. Ian tries to be friendly with the receptionist at the gym, then dithers about how to fix it when he realises he has made the wrong impression.
There are long stretches of action without dialogue, and the show is as allergic to exposition as it is to characters finishing their sentences. As Emma visits her elderly father, a man sitting with him hides upstairs – we don’t yet know who he is. Emma’s father is frosty, then accusatory, and in a single line we understand what is happening in their relationship, and the role that Ian has to play. They shift boxes from the bed of their daughter’s childhood room, and there are no children at home. We find out why in slow, steady reveals that are sparse and deeply affecting.
Of course, this requires a lot of trust in the writing, and the storytelling. You have to hold out your hand and be willing to be led, believing that it will take you somewhere you want to go. Bean taps into some of that pain, pushed down and away, that he performed so memorably in Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama Time. Even the small details here are rich. When he goes to the gym, the younger men give up their weights for him and call him “Sir”. It is a neat show of how old he must feel, and how surprised he is to feel it. Walker clings on to a busy, brittle briskness that suggests she doesn’t have time for feelings, particularly the big, complicated ones that keep threatening to intrude.
This is all about feelings, in the end. There is a pitch-perfect realism to the way these characters talk without really saying anything, then put across what they really mean while saying nothing at all. It’s so cleverly done. When their daughter Jess comes to visit, bringing her new boyfriend, you want to shake every single one of them into listening to what is actually being said and to act on it.
There is a lot of dithering, and a lot of keeping difficult conversations at arm’s length. This can be frustrating. It is an hour long, and you feel it. The tension it whips up – in Emma’s place of work, or in Ian’s lonely wandering, or at dinner with Jess’s creepy and controlling partner – can be genuinely unpleasant to sit through. But that is the point. This is all about the light and shade, the big and the small moments, what makes a marriage work and the cracks that can appear in it. It’s true that charging for sachets of tomato ketchup is an outrage; as is a colleague leaving rubbish on your desk; as is dealing with a demanding older parent, or an arrogant younger man. By the time they’re discussing the merits of a pre-dinner snack – traditional peanuts, or the pricier cashews? – the intimacy between Ian and Emma has welcomed in the viewer, too.
