Man in an Orange Shirt's finale is proof that the love of a good man is still a holy grail - review
The before-and-after trajectory of gay history is a gift for storytellers intrigued by time. Following a template laid down by Kevin Elyot’s plays and Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction, Patrick Gale’s drama Man in an Orange Shirt (BBC Two) was a well-crafted and moving dialogue between past and present.
The first episode was set in the prohibitive Forties, when the starkest choices open to gay men included the prison of a straight marriage or actual prison. The second episode advanced into a here and now which, Gale’s script was careful to insist, is by no means a never-had-it-so-good sunlit utopia.
Where his grandfather Michael (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) closeted himself in a sexless marriage, dishy orphaned vet Adam Berryman (Julian Morris) was the slave of supposedly sexually liberating dating apps. As a result, he was terrified of attachment (in the interests of balance, in Top of the Lake: China Girl the BBC is currently depicting young heterosexual men with the same affliction).
Adam’s nocturnal adventures, graphically enacted, amounted to an acidic critique of the gay dating apps Grindr and Scruff (here amalgamated as Grufff). It seems you really can have too much of a good thing. Detox took the form of nice designer Steve (David Gyasi), who restored not just his distressed cottage’s interior but Adam’s psyche, which was in a similar condition.
This is the second time Joanna Vanderham and Vanessa Redgrave have embodied younger and older incarnations of the same character. The woman they played in The Go-Between pays for a surfeit of illicit passion. Here they played Adam’s grandmother Flora, racked by an aversion to sex. Redgrave brought heart and integrity to a woman coming to terms with lifelong regret (although it was a tall order to imagine her as a nonagenarian).
Perhaps the dominoes of the plot all toppled a little too tidily, but there was a poignant cameo for the unposted letter written all those years ago by Michael for his beloved Thomas (James McArdle). This solid contribution to Gay Britannia argued that happy-ever-after romance is not the preserve of soppy heteros. Fifty years on from 1967, the love of a good man is still a holy grail.
