Our House (ITV) starts with a tantalisingly universal nightmare. Fi (Tuppence Middleton) returns home from a weekend away, spots a removal van outside her house and steps aside to let the movers pass – only for them to turn and walk right up her path. Her house has been emptied of her belongings, and a couple she has never met are moving in. They seem as baffled as she is. They tell her they picked up the keys this morning and show her a contract that bears her signature. The idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Only last year, a man returned to his house in Luton after working away after neighbours reported seeing someone inside; he found it gutted and in the middle of renovations because it had been sold without his knowledge. In such an impossible situation, what would you do?
It’s a good question, but one the opening episode doesn’t really try to answer. Instead, this four-parter, an adaptation of Louise Candlish’s 2018 novel, is standard ITV thriller territory, perfectly watchable, basically functional, if not particularly fresh. Whatever the TV equivalent of landfill indie is, this is it. It’s the kind of song that gets stuck in your head, because the first time you hear it, you feel as if you’ve heard it a hundred times before. Fi walks around her empty former home repeating “This is my house”, and, given that I watched every single episode of the surprise BBC gameshow hit of that name, I couldn’t help but start to sing its theme tune.
We flash back to 10 years earlier, when Fi and her husband, Bram (Martin Compston), come across the house they will turn into a World of Interiors magazine spread. They are so happy and in love that they tickle each other as they strip wallpaper. The house is huge and incredible, and appears to be in London, which made me spend far more time than I should have wondering how they could have afforded it. They both have generic middle-class jobs, in offices with lumbar support chairs and big glass windows, but, even so, that house must have cost a fortune. Over the years, they have children, paint the walls dark blue, put in parquet flooring and big glass sliding doors – then they stop tickling each other. The relationship finally falls apart when Fi comes home one night to catch Bram getting up to some excessively neighbourly behaviour in the shed.
Fi is the model of dignity here. As a portrait of divorce, it is all very respectful. She knows she doesn’t want to take Bram back, despite his pleading. They attempt to separate in the least disruptive way possible for the sake of their boys by “birdnesting”, which involves renting a flat across the road, and taking it in turns to live in the house, so the children don’t have to move. “This is not an intimate relationship, it’s a practical arrangement,” says the woman tasked with drawing up a contract for them. The same could be said of this first episode, which is so level-headed it’s crying out for the jolt of energy that comes towards the end, when hints of a greater deception finally, finally start to emerge.
I couldn’t understand the decision to “birdnest” rather than sell the house. “We’d lose a shit ton of money,” says Fi, though house prices haven’t crashed since the financial crisis of 2008, and they had done it up to a lovely standard, so, unless someone has opened a nightclub on one side and a 24-hour kebab shop on the other, I can’t see why they wouldn’t have made enough profit to buy two equally lovely, slightly smaller houses. Their disdain for the “studio” flat they share, an ex-local authority place with a drippy tap and non-fancy curtains that is far nicer than at least 70% of the flats I lived in in London, is hilarious.
But there wouldn’t be a drama if they had sold up and moved on peacefully, accepting that their relationship had run its course. And maybe the mysterious grandeur of the house will be explained in the episodes to come. There is an intriguing trail of breadcrumbs that hints at Bram’s ability to keep secrets. There are small fibs everywhere, and then, just when it appears to be a domestic drama with a property-porn twist, a bigger one explodes on to the screen. It arrives in the nick of time, and just about manages to save it.
