Drugs, sex, scorpions, breakdowns … a summer trip in Greece goes diabolically wrong in the BBC’s immaculate new show that will give you a well-earned break from bad TV.
Hell is other people. But a fortnight’s summer holiday in a Greek island villa with three pals you have known since university, the young second wife of one of them, your depressive husband and the mulish French nanny the second wife has hired to look after her foul child, is surely the innermost circle of it.
Such is the diabolical situation in which Zoe (Jessica Raine) finds herself in Two Weeks in August, an utterly convincing and wholly compelling blackly comic drama exquisitely written by Catherine Shepherd, immaculately directed by Tom George and Matthew Moore and perfectly played by the whole cast.
Zoe is a comprehensive school teacher managing life with more grace under pressure than most of us do. A natural carer and conciliator, she signed her family up for the trip partly because of friends’ expectations, but also because a fortnight away in the sun sounded like a pleasure. A temporary escape from her job and her ageing, demanding mother, a change for her two children, and a little relief perhaps after supporting her husband, Dan (Damien Molony) through his recent battles, which are eventually revealed in a brilliant climactic dinner table scene.
Making up the rest of the island gang are glamorous Nat (Leila Farzad), Jacob (Hugh Skinner), Solomon (Nicholas Pinnock), Jess (Antonia Thomas) and the mulish nanny Léa (Florence Banks). A standout moment comes in the second episode, when Jacob makes sure the owner of the boat they take out knows he works for a charity that “raises awareness of wealth inequality”.
Thus the stage is set for everything, delivered via an extraordinary performance from Raine, which lets us see and understand every moment of her journey and feel, in the end, that it could have gone no other way. Two Weeks in August is in itself like a holiday – a holiday from dramas made up of meretricious nonsense.
