The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.
Marmite actually features in Babies, in a scene midway through its six hour-long episodes in which Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) is munching one of the many slices of toast he gets through, this one smeared with Marmite. Which his wife Lisa (Siobhàn Cullen) intensely dislikes. So he takes himself off to the bathroom, returns with a tube of toothpaste and eats a mouthful of it to sweeten his savoury breath. It’s a brief scene, but, like so much in the series, it adds yet another colour to the palette Golaszewski builds up illustrating how a relationship sustains itself.
Stephen and Lisa are a thirtysomething couple with a seemingly modest ambition: to become parents. But they don’t seem to be able to sustain a foetus for more than 12 weeks (and three days). We see them navigate a run of agonising miscarriages, while all around seem to be cuddling babies. The couple’s optimism leaks away with each lost baby, the routine dimension of their misery taking over. They chart ovulation dates, take supplements, prop Lisa’s legs up against the wall after sex, become obsessed with their lack of success. Specialists test them and conclude they are perfectly healthy and must simply keep trying.
Much of the piece, though, is spent down the pub or the social club, where Stephen meets his parents or best friend Dave (Jack Bannon, pictured below with Charlotte Riley). It’s a noisy world of bogus bonhomie where cliched banter is standard-issue, grins are fixed and conversations are larded with “I’m good” and “It’s all good”. It isn’t, of course. Dave has a little son, Daniel, he sees just once a week, and a new girlfriend, Amanda (Charlotte Riley), who’s way out of his league and impelling him to present an increasingly false face to the world. She seems to be solely interested in the sex, whereas his ex is hostile and his son sits silently playing computer games in his bedroom, not acknowledging his presence.
The banter between Stephen and Dave is both terrific acting and nails-on-blackboard irritating. Neither says what he really feels. The word “really” even becomes a trigger for one of their worst rows. It’s puerile showmanship masking a fear of honesty. When we meet the men’s respective fathers, we see where they picked up this bad habit. (An extraordinary scene has Stephen and his dad simply exhaling emphatically at each other after glugs of their pints, almost as a substitute for talking.)
But the banter is key to the narrative’s intentions. The babies of the title aren’t just in car-seats and prams. Stephen and Dave aren’t fully formed, just idling without recognising it while waiting for their lives to get going. The women in their lives are more mature — executive-class Amanda, to the point of being hard-boiled — but the men don’t notice that until a crisis obliges them to.
For Stephen, this crunch-point comes when his mantra, “Stay positive, head up, eyes forward, keep focused” proves inadequate, and he is forced to empathise with Lisa's more emotive, less “rational” responses. Dave undergoes a similar education at the hands of his son. One of the beauties of the series is the way it inches towards a new version of happiness, and gradually shows Stephen and Lisa’s lives being transformed. The final episode, which cross-cuts rapidly back and forth between the present day and some 20 years on, is a moving declaration that change is possible.
The other great beauty of the piece is its acting. Essiedu has spoken of the way Golaszewski’s scripting is so detailed that each “um” is written in, and stuck to. Yet the dialogue sounds almost improvised. The two leads, in particular, have a naturalness that’s almost difficult to watch, as if we are intruding into the most intimate zone of their marriage. In fact, for the scenes in their bed, Golaszewski shuts us out: his camera is fixed outside the bedroom door, framing them in a sliver, much as mobile phones record events, so that their moves are distanced and private.
The tenderness of this couple towards each other, whose default mode is a big hug, is off the scale. Essiedu, going full native E17 for once, is a model of uxorious caring, eyes soulfully wide when Lisa is in pain. The scene in which they go for their first 12-week scan is especially poignant, their expressions as they face the monitor (and the camera) slowly melting from bright-eyed hope into silent misery. Cullen, too, is a joy to watch, a mercurial actor whose voice moves easily from a playful Irish lilt into a growl of unhappiness.
She and Stephen are also a funny couple, reminiscent of Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani in Him & Her, their gentle teasing on a different level from the inane, unfunny joshing of Stephen and Dave. On the other end of the spectrum, Dave and Amanda are almost like strangers with each other at times, their relationship resolutely physical rather than emotional. All four actors deliver superlative performances.
And for once, Golaszewski, previously a performer with the comedy group Cowards alongside Tim Key and Tom Basden of The Ballad of Wallis Island fame, makes an appearance of sorts here, shoring up the hole in his budget by writing and performing the songs that run over the credits. As a result, they have the weird spontaneity of a busker with a message to convey, with lyrics that describe the way words become vehicles for our feelings, amplified by love and exploding inside us. So be careful, out there, how you use them.
Babies is on BBC1; all episodes are available on iPlayer
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