Rain Dogs is only eight half-hour episodes long, but it’s a slow burner. My first instinct was to recoil from Cash Carraway’s black comedy as if, to borrow one of many visceral images from it, it were a coffee-colonic induced poo thrown at me. Rain Dogs’ comedy is so black at first it seems to obliterate any possibility of light or warmth. The stark opposite of funny. Despair-inducing, in fact. However, just as I urge you to stick with this nasty, brutish series, please read on.
We meet Daisy May Cooper’s Costello Jones – sober 99 days – as she’s being evicted from her council flat with her daughter, Iris. Episode one sees her go on a desperate hunt around London to find them a bed for the night. They try to sleep in a launderette. They break into a friend’s car so Iris can attempt her homework. Finally, they take the last available option, inevitably the most dangerous one, and bed down in the cupboard of a pervert (pervert is a word that comes up a lot in Rain Dogs. Also nonce. And whore). He makes Costello put on a pink satin nightie and tells her not to worry because she’s not fat, she’s “just got a food bank body”. She’s rescued by best friend Florian Selby, a filthy rich, entitled, self-annihilating “classical homosexual” with strong Withnail vibes who’s just been released from prison. The half-hour of hijinks ends with them breaking into Costello’s old flat, right back where they started. See what I mean about despair-inducing?
But I keep watching, and my ear starts to tune into the bracingly strong cadences of Carraway’s Bukowskian voice. Beneath the ballast of shock, violence and bawdy language, she’s quietly skewering the grotesque realities of class and sex inequality like virtually no one else. It’s writing that pushes you to the edge, then holds your head over it so you can see how things really are. It takes a little time to adjust to the high altitude.
By the end of the second episode I’m acclimatised. Fully invested in the resilience and brilliance of Costello, Selby’s razor wit, his monstrous mother Allegra (Anna Chancellor, on killer form), and the glorious Gloria (Ronke Adekoluejo) who works in her dad’s funeral parlour where she’s been known to take the occasional selfie with a “hot dead guy”. By the time Gloria is describing “the four whores of the apocalypse” to Iris as “Moll Flanders: official whore. Divine Brown: iconic whore. Julia Roberts: made every girl want to be one. And Billie Piper: ITV whore,” I am laughing my head off. As would Piper and Lucy Prebble, as Rain Dogs shares some of the brutal, surreal horror of their show, I Hate Suzie.
Cooper, as no one who saw her in This Country will be surprised to hear, is magnificent. Her Costello is defiant, broken, authentic and a master of saying all that can never be said with the tiniest downturn of her mouth. No wonder she’s being touted as the next M in James Bond. I can totally see it. There’s a scene in which she goes to clean the house of an incurably ill painter – and, yes, pervert – (Adrian Edmondson, in vintage Bottom mode), who’s been banned from the £2 peep show where she works for reasons you can imagine. As she polishes a glass table with a series of high-pitched squeaks, he finishes himself off. Afterwards, Costello pops his oxygen mask back on for him, takes her cash, and says with warmth and sarcasm, “It’s an awful life we live, but we do it with such dignity.”
Lots happens, fast. Costello is propositioned by a journalist while dancing at the peep show and urged to tell her story. She dreams of being a writer, so says yes. Of course, she’s screwed over and ends up shagging the photographer, a “poverty voyeur” whom she whispers to in bed, “You feel like Louis Theroux on one of his weird weekends, don’t you?” Carraway’s writing about class is genius. Costello, Selby and Iris run away to the country and pretend to be a functional rich family, as if such a thing exists. It ends in a punch-up and purgatory for them all: a rehab unit for Selby and for Costello and for Iris, a women’s refuge where “the only rule is we lay low and let the lord guide us”. Dear god. Iris (Fleur Tashjian), though, is too fundamentally sweet and unscarred considering what she’s been through. Even with a mother as loving as Costello, she would be a mess.
Eventually – for the revelations come in a slow drip-drip in Rain Dogs – we see why Costello is as she is. She goes home for the first time in 15 years. It’s a painful, incomplete and beautifully controlled scene, from the delay in her mum coming down to see her “because she’s just dropped a bath bomb” to the arrival of her awful brother who insists she’s an impostor. “Why would I want this life?” Costello says with a mirthless laugh. That is, a life shaped by abuse. Rain Dogs is not really a comedy at all. It’s a bleak and beautiful drama in which the rare laughs are a matter of survival, like holes punched through the dark.
Rain Dogs aired on BBC One and is now available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Binge in Australia.
