Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed

The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the South of France helmetless on motorcycles while laughing a lot. Love appeared to be in the air as well – given that they consisted of two couples: the men in charge of driving (different times), the girls holding them tightly around the waist. But then matters took a darker turn as a voice-over intoned that ‘memory is a false friend’ and we sometimes ‘create our own truth’.

And with that, we cut to present-day London where, despite its taste for banalities, the voice-over turned out to belong to a respected author called Thomas Degalais – duly seen signing books for a queue of grateful fans. Until, that is, his kindly acceptance of their adoration was undermined by a young queuer giving him an invitation to a reunion at his old French lycée. For a start, she looked exactly like one of the girls on the back of those bikes 25 years before (not surprisingly seeing as she was played by the same actress). She’d also scrawled on the back of the invitation, ‘What did you do to her?’ Clearly thrown, Thomas (Ioan Gruffudd) rang a French bloke who unavailingly begged him not to attend – especially as the lycée’s gym was being demolished and ‘if they dig in that basement our lives are over’.

If this all sounds rather confusing, that’s because it was. Several blurry flashbacks later, however, we had some vague idea of what was going on. Certainly, amid the traditional scenes of student horseplay – and, this being France, of philosophical debates about ‘alienation’ – the identity of the carefree couples was gradually established. Max, the French bloke, had been sharing a saddle with an ex, or possibly current, girlfriend of Thomas’s; Thomas himself with his new love Vinca, accurately described as ‘serious, sensual but with a crazy streak’ (i.e.