3 January

I couldn’t recommend this show highly enough. Gripping Brit crime thriller, but way more than that. The Brits are peerless with this stuff, so much more sophisticated than the black and white moralising coming out of many other cultures. What it does that makes it great art I think is explore the human desires that end up as crimes, and as a result there isn’t any black and white here. No goodies and baddies, but an extraordinary edge-of-your-seat tension of the complex ways ordinary life tries to deal with ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ desires and behaviours, and their contact with the law. The show also asks questions like, does what we’ve desired and done in the past determine how we should be judged in the present? Can a person love multiple people without betraying any of them? Etc. It scares me that we judge one another, including in law, using the assumption that we are rational creatures at root, rather than desiring creatures. This show explores the incredible damage that does. Reason itself is a type of desire.