Sticks and Stones, episode 1 review: Mike Bartlett's bullying drama will make you feel queasy
Is Mike Bartlett a bit of bully? He does love to inflict pain on his characters. Nowhere was this tendency more overt than in Bull, a sweaty play about workplace bullying. To thump home the point, the action took place in a boxing ring with the audience watching from the other side of the ropes.
Bull has now mutated into Sticks and Stones (ITV), to be told over three nightly episodes. Susannah Fielding survives from the play as a minxish tormentor who blows hot and cold. Bartlett’s punchbag is pathetically likeable Thomas Benson (Ken Nwosu, who has the nicest face). When he cocked up a pitch to sell a company a “bespoke office solution”, fainting mid-bid, his team was soon plotting to thwart him, subtly egged on by their nudging winking boss (Ben Miller).
To amp up the jeopardy, Thomas has been provided with a nice home and a delectable family: his wife Jess (Alexandra Roach) works as a nurse, and his daughter Millie (Daisy Boo Bradford) is deaf. Surely they are too blamelessly good to be collateral damage in Bartlett’s sadism. There was a welcome hint at the end of the episode that Thomas will discover his spine and embark on a course of vigilantism.
As with Doctor Foster, we are in a heightened version of the Home Counties where nothing feels wholly plausible. It was key to the plot that Thomas would not notice that his clocks were wrong and turn up for a key meeting a whole hour earlier. Then his car got towed away minutes after he’d parked it. There is the diluting flavour of a buffoonish Tom Sharpe farce here.
By leavening the psychological savagery with jollity, Bartlett leaves you feeling vaguely queasy. It’s not quite clear how entertaining this is all meant to be. It will only really be dramatically satisfying if, unlike in Bull, Thomas fights back. “You do it back but worse,” he tells Millie when she’s bullied at school. More of that, please.
