You'll need more than gas and air to unravel this baby drama: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

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In The Club

Rating:

Good Lord, no! You don’t need to watch the first series of In The Club (BBC1) to understand what’s going on as the mother-and-baby drama returns for a second run. Everything is perfectly simple.

Katherine Parkinson plays Kim, a bisexual (or ‘radical non-binary’, as I think we have to say these days) who is living with her ex-girlfriend’s former male lover, Neil (Jonathan Kerrigan). 

Kim and Neil have a baby together. That’s not so complicated.

In The Club: You don’t need to watch the first series of In The Club (BBC1) to understand what’s going on as the mother-and-baby drama returns for a second run. Everything is perfectly simple.....

Jasmin and Dev: Rumour has it that two film editors at the Beeb had nervous breakdowns while trying to compile a story-so-far summary for the second series of In The Club

Neil is Jude’s dad. Jude is 16 and he’s had a baby with his teenage girlfriend, Rosie. When Kim was a teacher, Rosie was in her class.

Got that? Of course you have.

Now, concentrate: Jude’s mother is Susie, Kim’s lesbian ex-lover. Susie and her new partner, Claire, live in Kim’s old house where they’re bringing up Rosie’s daughter, because . . . no, hold on . . . as you were.

Anyway, just remember that Kim is Rosie’s mother-in-law’s ex-partner and her father-in-law’s current partner. Hang on to that fact and you can’t go wrong.

Rumour has it that two film editors at the Beeb had nervous breakdowns while trying to compile a story-so-far summary for the second series. 

We last saw these characters in 2014, but new viewers were plunged into the narrative, set nine months later, with no explanations.

We last saw these characters in 2014, but new viewers were plunged into the narrative, set nine months later, with no explanations

In The Club is an ensemble drama following the lives of half-a-dozen couples from different backgrounds whose lives intersect at the maternity clinic. This format is the speciality of writer Kay Mellor, who created Fat Friends (about a dieters’ club) and The Syndicate (about co-workers sharing a Lottery win).

These shows have a built-in dilemma for the writer: does she create a new set of characters for each new series or stick with the old ones? This time, she’s done neither — instead, Mellor has fudged it, by keeping the old cast and adding some more.

So, if your head wasn’t already whirling, meet newcomer Maxine (Sandra Huggett), the rent-a-womb surrogate mother who is having a baby for a gay couple, and her mum Shelly (Gemma Dobson), who went to the loo at the hospital clinic and came back with a premature baby. She says she just ‘found it’.

There’s a terrible danger with such a complex set-up . . . and that’s before we mention the husband in jail, the unborn twins with a life-threatening condition or the posh woman with her toyboy.

Faced with this mind-tangling conundrum, many viewers will just give up. It’s easier to go and do something relatively soothing, such as three-dimensional chess.

And that’s a shame, because Mellor is a witty writer who slips clever lines into every scene. There was Maxine, thick as cold porridge, slumped on a chair in the waiting room, explaining why surrogacy was such an enticing option: ‘It’s nice to help out and I get all me payday loans sorted out in one go.’

And then her mother ran in from the toilets, with that newborn swaddled in her fake leopardskin jacket, panicking to the nurses: ‘Will I get me coat back? Only we’re on the bus and it looks like rain.’ That’s great dialogue. It’s a pity that most viewers will have missed it, because they were scratching their heads and asking each other: ‘Who’s she, then?’

Conspiracy Files: Who Shot Down MH17? 

Rating:

Less confusing fare was supplied by Conspiracy Files: Who Shot Down MH17? (BBC2), which attempted an easier puzzle by discovering who killed 280 people when a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet exploded over a Ukrainian war zone two years ago.

Conspiracy Files: Who Shot Down MH17?

You probably thought it was Russian-backed rebels, who mistook it for a military transport plane and downed it with a ground-to-air missile. And you’d almost certainly be right.

After an hour of red herrings and false trails, plus a lorry-load of ludicrous theories peddled by the Moscow media, the missile was the only plausible explanation.

To reach that conclusion, though, we had to listen to far too many self-appointed internet experts, retired CIA analysts and gap-toothed peasants.

We did discover that Putin’s propaganda machine relies on multiple conspiracy theories ‘to pulverise viewers’ minds’. They should try watching In The Club.