Finding Alice ep 3, review: It may be unconventional, but don't discount Keeley Hawes's raw and affecting performance
It’s Keeley Hawes’s world and we just live in it. The frighteningly prolific actress is currently appearing in Channel 4 AIDS drama It’s a Sin, thoroughly stealing the show during its heart-wrenching finale. Next weekend, BBC One reruns the second series of Line of Duty, which provided Hawes’s career-changing role as the morally murky DI Lindsay Denton. A fortnight later, she stars in the Roald Dahl film biopic To Olivia.
Comedy-drama Finding Alice (ITV), meanwhile, is a curious concoction – quirky romcom meets mystery thriller meets meditation on grief – but miraculously Hawes, as Alice, makes it work. As the series reached its midway mark, it was time for the inquest into the seemingly accidental death of Alice’s beloved husband Harry (Jason Merrells). Before it could take place, though, there were a few problems to resolve – namely the property dispute over the couple’s Grand Designs-esque £1.5m home and Harry’s secret son George (George Webster) becoming increasingly evasive, even though he was the main witness to his biological father’s fatal fall. As Alice asked: “Is George a gold-digger or a psychopath… or both?”
Hawes gave a raw and affecting portrayal of a bereaved woman desperately trying to navigate her way through the awkward practicalities of her partner’s sudden death. She self-medicated with white wine and Diazepam, aka “happy pills”. She wept in the bath and at the wheel of her car, nearly suffering a serious prang in the process. She did the school run still wearing her pyjamas (“They look like sportswear!” she insisted) and told an estate agent he was a “silly t--t”. And frankly, who hasn’t fantasised about doing that?
Hawes wasn’t afraid of being unlikeable yet always retained viewers’ sympathy. Her character was potty-mouthed and blunt to the point of rudeness. In mitigation, Alice admitted she’d become “emotionally incontinent”, her “antenna were broken” and “because I’m grieving, I think I can c--p all over people”.
This was a nuanced depiction of the ripple effects of loss. “Who’d have thought that one death could cause so much hate?” pondered Alice. The quartet of veteran thesps playing her parents and in-laws – Joanna Lumley, Nigel Havers, Gemma Jones and Kenneth Cranham – added heft. However, the lesser known Isabella Pappas (as teenage daughter Charlotte) and Rhashan Stone (as mortuary technician-cum-bereavement expert Nathan) did more of the emotional heavy lifting. It’s this pair who impressed most among the supporting cast.
Co-written by Simon Nye, the blackly comic, genre-defying script was reminiscent of his vastly underrated Nineties series How Do You Want Me?. There was a misunderstanding of #metoo and an unexpectedly rousing Lion King singalong. One irresistibly daft gag saw Alice misread some scrawled handwriting and momentarily think that George’s mother was a terrapin. “No, it says therapist.”
It might be unconventional, verging on bizarre at times, but once you tune into its heightened tone, Finding Alice grips and charms in equal measure. Steely Keeley. Touch-feely Keeley. Is there nothing the versatile Hawes can't do?
