Photograph: Channel 4
What a sad, beautiful, clever, wrenching series Somewhere Boy (Channel 4) is. It is the kind of drama that rewards knowing as little as possible about it, as it unfurls the story slowly and with great care. But the bare bones are that Danny (an excellent Lewis Gribben) has spent most of his life cloistered in a rundown house in the middle of the countryside, with his father, Steve. Steve is trying to keep his son safe from the “monsters” outside, but when Danny turns 18, he is wrenched out of his home and sent, or more accurately taken, back into the real world.
Somewhere Boy is one of those rare dramas that manages to hold several themes in its hands and examine each one with equal consideration. It is about starting again and fitting in; trauma and abuse; family and love; and monsters, both figurative and literal. Danny ends up living with Steve’s sister Sue and her family, and at first, we see him adjusting to life as an 18-year-old newborn. He asks blunt questions. He doesn’t know he should knock before going into people’s bedrooms. And, crucially, he doesn’t yet understand why he was kept away from the world for such a long time.
