The Last of The Last Weekend

It’s that ubiquitous childhood memory that none of us is sure actually happened, the staple film scene that calls to mind about a dozen titles without having been in any of them. A boy, let’s call him Tommy, is finally shunning the stabilizers and going it alone. His dad, let’s call him Joe, for a brief time eschews his movie-role as the hapless thirty-something who never quite bonded with poor Tommy to take on the role of cycling mentor. It’s green, and there’s dog-walkers and children looking on, maybe even the bigger kids from Tommy’s class. Joe guides his junior carefully along as Tommy beams: he’s doing it, daddy! Swelling with pride, Joe releases Tommy to go it alone, to steer unguided. Cue triumphant music. Then adversity hits. Providing a timely twist to the story, as Tommy’s burgeoning trust in his father is dashed and the only way to salvage it is an airport chase, Tommy realizes his old man has relinquished support. Tommy panics, and his handlebars twist furiously; he snakes off the park’s path and onto the lawns before careering disastrously away from his father and smashing into the bushes (or pond, dependent on whether the film’s budget allows it). After an auspicious start, it’s all gone horrible awry. This week, I watched the final two parts of ITV drama The Last Weekend, which garnered a favorable DitB post for its first installment. Wherever could I be going with this?

A tall order: The Last Weekend had set the bar high

Perhaps I’m being a touch too harsh with my Tommy-analogy; there was, throughout the penultimate and final Sunday-night episodes, some accomplished drama-writing. The headache came from picking out the good bits from the bad, especially towards the end when the latter very much held sway. Thematically, the series continued to offer food for thought with its format as Ian (Shaun Evans) resumed his role as involved narrator and proceeded to tell his story. At the start of episode two, he revealed that he was facing an investigation at the school where he worked for the apparent racial assault of a playground bully, and the revelation succeeded in making us reevaluate the memories he’d shared with us in part one; it added a layer of complication, of deceit and mistrust, to Ian’s account. Towards the end of the show, too, Ian remembered the line ‘come and give me a hug’ cropping up in a conversation between himself and his beloved Daisy (Genevieve O'Reilly), but wouldn’t or couldn’t clarify the specifics. As he became increasingly fixated by the wife of his former best friend, Ian seemed capable of convincing himself of things that had never been true, of doctoring his own recollections to appease himself, and even remembering words spoken by Daisy that were never said in reality. The unease we felt towards Ian quadrupled with these semi-edited memories, and it was thought-provoking even without this bonus. Can we trust what we’re told? Can we believe first hand accounts? Is everything we remember, or are told, a censored and warped form of the event? Judging by our universal Tommy-memory, maybe we’re all a little bit Ian.

Moments in episode three, too, threatened to undermine my father/son cycling-metaphor. Unhinged and jealous, Ian set out to sabotage the intimacy between Daisy and her art client Milo (Alexander Karim), and cover his own tracks in Ollie’s (Rupert Penry-Jones') eyes after forcing himself on Daisy at the end of the penultimate part. Ian planted the seed in Ollie’s head that Daisy was being unfaithful, leading to a dinner-scene in the final installment which saw an erratic Ollie almost come to blows with his wife’s client after demanding to know who had slept with whom over the weekend. There was something notably Othello about the situation (especially with the pervading mentions of racism and storms), and the awkwardness around the dinner table was almost tangible. Although it was subtle and sharp, though, the scene proved poisonous to the pace of the series. Ian’s manipulation of Ollie had, in the end, come too late on; a slow-burning part of the plot, it was introduced five-sixths of the way through the run and served only to disrupt the momentum we’d built up to this point. In my last post, I celebrated the show for its understated drama and gradual build-ups, but the time for such measured writing was long since passed by the time the five-some sat down to dinner.

Three's a crowd: Ollie and Daisy are watched over by Ian

With the pace taking a pummeling, the tension of the series became its only hope; sluggishness could almost be excused if it had been anxious or edgy, but The Last Weekend offered neither. When Ian, still guilty after effectively raping Daisy, walked back to the sofa where it had happened, Ollie launched towards him with a sword in hand, ranting and crazed. But it was just a joke. When Ollie ominously told Ian to get in his revving car and that they ‘needed to talk’, things look set to finally get going. But it was just about their blasted sporting competition. When Em (Claire Keelan) got teary at the table following Ollie’s remarks, she tantalized us with the thought of her own secret. But it was just about not being able to conceive, and she hurriedly shrunk back into the woodwork never to be heard from again. When Daisy’s protestations were ignored, she looked ready to sensationally tell Ollie what his supposed friend had done to her and Ian would finally get his comeuppance. But she kept it to herself. With each of these anti-climaxes we felt cheated, and the series’ ability to conjure up any semblance of tension became less and less as time wore on. By the time Ollie and Ian did have their final spar and Ollie came a cropper, I half expected them to both start heartily embracing and giggling ‘April Fool’s!’ at one another; it was an unremarkable, silent underwater episode that did little to remedy the tedium that had gone before it. Tension-trouble also came from the fluid dynamics within the group. In episode two, Ian seemed buoyed by his and Ollie’s apparent joint mistrust of Milo and disheartened when, in a doubles tennis match, he was paired with the newcomer against his decades-old buddy; the rapidly shifting relationships meant that any established tension quickly counted for nothing, and with Ian’s Milo-angst and Ollie-angst being so interchangeable it was difficult to care about either.

Bookish: The novel adaptation should perhaps remain in print

The series’ close was the biggest giveaway that this was telly based on a book, namely Blake Morrison’s thriller novel, and also the time that my Tommy-analogy was most unreservedly applicable. As Ian’s past and present fused, and he finished his story by visiting Daisy, it became clear that some time had elapsed between Ollie’s demise and Ian’s account: Daisy had moved on, Em had divorced her wayward husband and Ian was gaunter and shabbier than ever. After a final rejection from his university sweetheart, Ian was left jabbering obsessively about mathematical signs (having revealed, conveniently, that he was fixated by the number 9 about twenty minutes back) and plots to finally claim his triathlon prize money from Ollie. After such a promising start, it was bizarre without the excuse of being symbolic or well thought-out, and wholly unsatisfactory having persevered with episode three. In novel-form, perhaps it came off as uniquely cathartic or more justified, but on screen I, for one, felt more duped than a dripping-wet Tommy heckled by those pesky big kids.