White Heat, BBC Two

Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For estranged friends Charlotte (Juliet Stevenson) and Lily (Lindsay Duncan) it’s also a country fraught with unresolved tensions and deeply painful secrets, and one that they’re forced to revisit after a death brings the old group back together in the present day. 

So far, so The Big Chill. But the more commonly drawn comparison has been to the Beeb’s beloved flatmates drama This Life – it’s perhaps unsurprising that the marketing has focused on the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll young 'uns rather than the quiet devastation of their aged counterparts.

There’s an unfortunate tendency for characters to speak in polemic sound bites rather than sentences

After a brief foray into the present day which sees Stevenson’s Charlotte arrive at the house she shared four decades prior, we shift back into 1965 to see the day she moved in. The bright-eyed young Charlotte (Claire Foy), desperate to get away from her suburban parents and their on-the-rocks marriage, is interviewed by prospective landlord Jack (Sam Claflin), a self-styled rebellious liberal.

It’s something of a shrewd trick on Milne’s part to write the character as so overtly, self-consciously political. By having Jack “parade his radical credentials” to the point that he irritates just about everybody around him, the show’s own less-than-subtle political parading becomes that bit less obtrusive. Take his gambit to the newly assembled tenants, in which he outlines his vision for their modus operandi – which, in brief, involves “eliminating the exclusivity of couples”. You get the picture. Only Charlotte, impressionable enough to be smitten despite her obvious smarts and feminist streak, raises her hand in concurrence with the "free love" motion. The moment is tongue-in-cheek enough to offset some of the episode’s later, clunkier moments of social commentary – and make no mistake, there are plenty.

There’s an unfortunate tendency, in fact, for characters to speak in polemic sound bites rather than sentences. Following a tense slavery-based fracas, Jamaican law student Victor (David Gyasi) complains, “For all Jack’s talk of poverty and inequality, he knows nothing of them.” Anybody watching with more than one per cent of their brain cells engaged will have worked this much out for themselves, and it’s not clear why the line exists other than to hammer home a point already well made. 

Making up the rest of the group we have Lily (MyAnna Burning, pictured right), who’s studying art despite her working class parents’ protestations that it “won’t put food on the table”; Alan (Being Human’s Lee Ingleby), a Geordie lad determined to better himself who clashes with Jack even more ferociously than Victor; and finally medical student Jay (Reece Ritchie) and Belfast-born Catholic Orla (Jessica Gunning), both of whom are outsiders harbouring secrets. Within these first 60 minutes alliances have formed, rifts set in, and crushes – both requited and unrequited – made themselves plainly felt. It’s not difficult, especially given the tension between Charlotte and Lily in the present day, to make out the shape of things to come.