James Walton

Adult entertainment | 26 January 2017

Plus: almost every moment of BBC2's The Cult Next Door brought new eye-popping disclosures

The mid-life crisis novel, I think it’s fair to say, is traditionally a male form. But in Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, the person feeling a bit trapped in what might seem a pretty nice life — while also fretting about how much (or how little) sex the rest of it will contain — is fiftysomething Yvonne Carmichael: wife, mother and all-round radiator of female competence.

In BBC1’s adaptation of Apple Tree Yard (Sunday), Yvonne was first heard giving us a brief meditation on the provisional nature of civilised behaviour — a voiceover, it turned out, being delivered as she travelled in the back of a prison van. We then flashed back nine months to when she was in her middle-class pomp, able to dazzle a parliamentary select committee with her knowledge of genetics and still make it home in time for the Tesco order.

But then as she was leaving the Commons, Yvonne (Emily Watson) really did bump into a dark handsome stranger (Ben Chaplin). For my money, his chat-up lines scored higher for originality than erotic charge. Nevertheless, ‘Have you seen the chapel in the crypt?’ evidently did the trick, because a few minutes later the two were having sex against a cupboard wall, even though the stranger got his foot caught in a bucket halfway through. ‘I’ve never done anything like that before,’ Yvonne told him, convincingly, once they’d finished.

Back home, Yvonne studied herself in the mirror, allowing Watson to convey by face alone an impressive variety of emotions, including wonder, puzzlement and shock — before finally settling on pride. She and her husband then had dinner, duly featuring those infallible TV signifiers of ordered bourgeois life: huge wine glasses with a weirdly small amount of booze in the bottom.

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