Mark Womack

Jimmy McGovern's Moving On, review: daytime viewers deserve a bit more than this

• Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On (BBC One) is back to inject a bit of drama into the daytime schedules. It has been hailed as a modern Play for Today, but think of it more as an episode of Casualty without the recurring characters or the medical bits. Well, without many medical bits. Anxious groom Ben was outside the church, worrying because his best man had gone awol on the morning of the wedding. His proud mum, Lucy, was there to calm his nerves. And then she spotted a man in the pews who turned out to be Ian, her husband and Ben’s father, “back from the dead”. “You weren’t supposed to see me,” said Ian, although if you’re trying to remain incognito after two decades of being presumed dead, maybe taking a seat in an otherwise empty church isn’t the best way of going about it? But this is a 45-minute drama, and there’s a lot to get through. McGovern created Moving On but the episodes are written by others. This script was from David Chidlow and delivered an effective first few minutes. We quickly knew the set-up and the fact that Ian had left due to a family trauma, which we waited until near the end to discover. The best man storyline was ticking away in the background, ready to be wound into a neat plot resolution. The acting from Nico Mirallegro as Ben was decent, and from Marie Critchley and Mark Womack as his parents. But it all slid into sentimentality, and I had to stifle a groan when Ian announced that he only had six months to live. This is the stuff of EastEnders (and I am, in my bones, a Coronation Street viewer). Ian was self-pitying, Lisa was the stoic one who had held it together through her heartbreak for the sake of her boy. A drama in the primetime schedule might have done something with these characters, played with our expectations or our sympathies; it could have asked if we were being too quick to judge Ian as a coward for walking out on his family, rather than examining the impact of grief. But daytime dramas rarely go deep.