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Following the relative happy ending of Helen’s Story last week (and this being a Jimmy McGovern drama, relative happy endings ought to be cherished) things were as dark as ever with this week’s ‘Liam’s Story’. The episode told the tale of a taxi driver who, frustrated by his life and lack of purpose, becomes obsessed with a female client, leading him to commit a terrible crime.
As with all of the stories so far, one thing that this episode of Accused very much had going for it was a strong central performance. Andy Serkis is slowly carving out a great career for himself, and he played the many elements of Liam’s personality beautifully. The constant war between is frustrated intellect, his fascination with Emma and his awareness his behaviour wasn’t right was clear to see without ever being overtly stated. The side he showed to Emma was convincingly charming, so her reaction to him seemed believable. Jodie Whittaker didn’t have a great deal to do, but her portrayal of a woman severely damaged by recent events in her life was nicely understated.
The restlessness that lead Liam to obsession was spelt out a little too obviously in the scene with his daughter, which felt unnecessary as it’d already been established effectively in the opening of the drama. So some sort of terrible behaviour seemed likely, but the writers bravely chose to leave the reasons behind the particular obsession itself fairly random. I also spent the whole episode trying to work out what his crime was; I wavered between him having killed his wife or Emma, but Neil had never really occurred to me. In the end, his crime seemed lacked the intensity that it could have had if Liam had killed him in a different way, and I’m not sure that the unexpected victim really added anything.
My biggest problem was that the parts of the episode involving his wife and his daughter felt underwritten, and I wasn’t convinced by his daughter at all. The passion with which he described thinking about killing her, and then dreaming about it, didn’t match up with the investment we seemed to be expected to make in their characters. As such, key parts of the drama actually dragged, and it wasn’t until his wife swiftly decimated his value as a husband and father towards the end of the episode that I actually felt anything for that element of the story.
This wasn’t the strongest episode of Accused so far due to a slightly unconvincing crime and the fact that some of the most important parts of the story didn’t really work. Still, it was a compelling hour of television thanks to two brilliant central performances.
See the penultimate episode of Accused, ‘Kenny’s Story’, next Monday at 9pm on BBC1.
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