Touchingly free of cynicism: C4’s Somewhere Boy reviewed

At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following his father’s suicide – and what she, the police and social services regard as a lifetime of abuse. Since he was small, Danny’s father, Sam, had forbidden him from going outside, telling him the world was full of monsters who’d kill him if he did. He’d therefore grown up listening to old songs and watching old films – all the while believing that his beloved dad was keeping him safe.

Yet once Danny was installed in Sue’s house, sharing a bedroom with his cousin Aaron, it soon became clear that this was by no means a simple tale of parental cruelty. As the flashbacks demonstrated, Danny’s devoted but mentally ill father really did think he was acting in his son’s best interests. The reason for his mental illness was portrayed sympathetically too. When Danny was a boy, Sam’s wife had been killed by a hit and run driver. ‘I lost your mum to a monster, Danny,’ Sam explained. ‘I’m not going to lose you too.’

As this might suggest, what unfolded over the next four nights was often desperately sad. But it was also tender, thoughtful, occasionally funny and full of unforced nuance. The result was a programme so original that it made you realise afresh just how formulaic so much TV drama is, with even the best shows being those that play most deftly with their chosen formula – usually, of course, crime.

Somewhere Boy, by contrast, retained an unselfconscious strangeness that made it impossible to categorise. While its realism never failed to be realistic, it also had intriguing elements of fable – or, more accurately, of several different fables, perhaps including Covid lockdown.

What parent, for example, doesn’t want to protect their child from the horrors of the world? Or can be guaranteed to recognise the damage they’re doing when they know they’re motivated by love? What child wants to see an apparently (or genuinely) loving parent as a malign force?

The same sense of fable applied as Danny emerged into the world: at first bewildered by the absence of monsters, and then by the presence of so much else, from teenage parties to internet pornography.