Meet Rob. He’s charming and charismatic. He seems to know exactly what it is you’ve been looking for. You fall wildly in love… but then, one day, he mysteriously vanishes. And where have your life savings gone? You’ll never know, but chances are, Rob is spending them somewhere.
Such is the premise of the BBC’s latest fictional drama, The Following Events Are Based On A Pack Of Lies. Twisted, off-beat and quirky, it’s a fascinating look at the well-trodden ground of the con man.
Pop culture has a peculiar fascination with confidence tricksters. The Talented Mr Ripley; Ocean’s Eleven; real life stories like the Tinder Swindler and Anna Delvey: often, they’re mythologised as glamorous figures, swanning about and executing blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feats without breaking a sweat.
The Following Events… is not like that. At all. Instead, the show zooms out to focus on the victims as much as the perpetrator. There’s Rob, of course – played with a fascinating combination of slickness and menace by Sex Education’s Alistair Petrie. But there’s also Alice (Rebekah Statton), who is still suffering after a run-in with Rob years ago; and Cheryl (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the celebrity author now in his sights.
When Alice spots Rob walking around Oxford, she’s stunned. She should be: he vanished, along with her family’s life savings, in the early Noughties and now he’s masquerading as Dr Robert Chance, climate activist (endorsed by none other than Derek Jacobi’s David Attenborough-esque grandad, Sir Ralph Unwin). Determined to figure out exactly what he’s up to, she starts down a rabbit hole of deceit in her attempts to (finally) get revenge – which involves impersonating her boss, manipulating her friends and lying to Cheryl in an attempt to get close to her and catch Rob in the act.
All good fun, you might think. Well… not so much. Yes, the show has a mischievous sense of humour – Rob’s inflated sense of self-worth is played for laughs, as are the ridiculous situations Alice finds herself lying her way into – but every so often the capers screech to a halt and we get an in-depth look at the sinister way he really works.
When it comes to Cheryl, that means love-bombing: that is, lavishing her with gifts and thoughtful gestures until he is enmeshed in every aspect of her life. For Alice (and the other women he has used in the past) it means experiencing PTSD-style flashbacks where Rob’s disembodied voice taunts her. “She’s not a well woman,” she imagines him telling a friend. “She’s always had problems… you know I’m the only person that speaks the truth.”
It makes for an oddly uneven watch: on the one hand, it’s a jolly story (featuring bright pink capes and gorgeously colourful interior design) about a bad guy getting his comeuppance; on the other, some of the scenes where Rob threatens Alice and tells her to stop digging into his past are genuinely disturbing.
So, this is an ambitious piece of work that sometimes fails to marry its constituent parts. But it is still very watchable. Petrie is a chillingly convincing Rob, turning on a dime between charming and threatening, while Jean-Baptiste is simply gorgeous as Cheryl, who is dignified, suspicious and still mourning her late husband Lance.
Rebekah Statton steals the show in her bright pink cape and stiff upper lip, always on the verge of wobbling into panic – and hats off to Romola Garai, who plays the thankless role of Alice’s overbearing, yummy-mummy boss Juno Fish with just the right amount of affronted hysteria.
Refreshingly, The Following Events... doesn’t make the mistake of patronising its female leads or the audience: these are intelligent people who are subjected to a systematic campaign of scams and gaslighting, which can prove psychologically devastating (though the grainy old-timey videos interviewing previous victims of other scams is a bit much). But despite its darker side, this show is a ripping good yarn; before you know it, it’ll have tricked you into watching it all.
