Thinking inside the box | 16 May 2019

These days, a common way of introducing radio news items is with the words ‘How worried should we be about…?’ The trouble with this formula is not just the strange notion that anxiety has apparently become some sort of moral duty — even a badge of honour. It’s also that we generally know what the answer will be: we should be very worried indeed. Now, in Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years (BBC1, Tuesday), the same formula serves as the premise for a television drama.

The first episode began by introducing us to three adult siblings, scrupulously chosen to represent modern Britain — at least as seen on TV. (The publicity material duly calls them ‘an ordinary British family’.) In Manchester, Daniel Lyons was watching Question Time with his boyfriend Ralph, while also texting his London-based brother Stephen, whose posh black wife Celeste takes an oddly stern line on her teenage children drinking milk (‘Milk’s no good for you, darling. It’s just mucus.’). The brothers were then interrupted by a phone call from sister Rosie, an unfailingly feisty woman in a wheelchair who was about to give birth to a baby from a fling with a Chinese bloke.

Being a close-knit lot, the Lyons were soon gathered in the maternity ward, where Stephen welcomed the baby with an impassioned speech about the dreadfulness of today’s world. So, he wondered gloomily, what would it be like in five years’ time?

And with that the show’s high concept kicked in, as we fast-forwarded in montage form through Donald Trump’s re-election, Daniel and Ralph’s marriage and Russian troops in Ukraine — before pitching up in 2024 where everything was fine.

I am, of course, only joking. In fact, everything was terrible. China and America were in a dangerous stand-off and Daniel was working at an underfunded Ukrainian refugee camp in Manchester.