The Rumour (Channel 5)
Do people really do that? Family portraits are one thing . . . but Emily Atack has a lifesize photo of herself, signed with kisses, plastered across her living room wall.
Not in real life, of course. That’s the character she plays in The Rumour — Debbie, the queen bee of the school gate mums.
The reason for this domestic ego trip hasn’t been explained yet, but I’m guessing Debbie was a minor celeb in the Noughties, before she married her estate agent hubbie and settled down in her home with its showpiece kitchen and acres of black leather furnishings.
Debbie is the sort of woman who appoints herself head of the committee that decides whether other mums are worthy of admission to the elite clique — and, more important still, whether their children will be accepted.
Atack plays her to perfection: rude, smug, false and, underneath the facade, deeply unhappy. I’d love to see a revival of BBC2’s Motherland with Debbie holding court.
Spitefully barring the new boy at the school, shy Alfie, from her son’s birthday party, she brags about what a lavish affair it will be, by letting everyone know about the stress of, ‘having a big old row with party planners and cake decorators’.
Alfie’s mum, Joanna (Rachel Shenton), makes the gruesome mistake of trying to ingratiate herself with Debbie, by offering some gossip.
A single mother, newly arrived in a provincial town, she’s heard online speculation that Sally McGowan, a notorious child killer, might be among their neighbours.
McGowan was a schoolgirl when she stabbed a small boy to death. Long since freed from prison, she’d be in her sixties and living, of course, under a different name.
It’s a horribly plausible notion, with shades of the Mary Bell story — largely forgotten now, but a sensation in the late 1960s when 11-year-old Bell murdered two little boys in Newcastle, aged three and four, by strangling them.
She served 12 years for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
A renewed surge of interest in the case followed in 1998, when investigative journalist Gitta Sereny tracked down Bell — by now the mother of a teenager — and collaborated on a book with her.
In the social media era, the unmasking of such a murderer would surely stir up even more obsession and outrage.
The Rumour, which continues tonight, fails to explore how intense that outrage could be.
Instead, it keeps local interest at the level of gossip and vandalism — a window smashed, accusations daubed in paint, but no mobs with pitchforks.
The story drifts towards Joanna’s personal life and her fractured relationship with ex-partner Michael (Samuel Anderson), who claims his long absences are due to his job on the North Sea oil rigs.
A likely tale. I’d be more inclined to believe him if he said he was building offshore wind farms.
