Age Before Beauty review: You know what you’re getting when you enter the brassy Mirrorbel beauty salon

Having cast a disparaging eye over Debbie Horsfield’s adaption of Poldark, I felt morally obliged (unusually for me) to give her latest drama, Age Before Beauty, a fair trial. On the plus side, at least it’s set in 2018 rather than 1818, and is original. There’s not a tricorn hat or frilly bonnet in sight, though that’s not to say it is entirely free of blemishes.

It’s about a bunch of brassy, sassy but not necessarily classy women living chaotic lives and trying to make a living at a beauty salon in Manchester. So not remotely like her previous runaway successes, Making Out, which was about a bunch of brassy, sassy but not necessarily classy women living chaotic lives and trying to make a living at a factory in Manchester. Or Cutting It, which was about a bunch of brassy, sassy but not necessarily classy etc, that time working in a hair salon in Manchester.

So you know, roughly, what you’re getting when you enter the brassy, sassy world of the Mirrorbel beauty salon. You’re going to get some actually quite witty and lively writing and “big” characters, as if the cast of Trainspotting had suddenly and bizarrely decided to open a boutique doing lashes (Spud), tats (Sick Boy), and liposuction (Begbie – imagine that).

I especially liked – you’d have to – the sour, bitchy, vain Leanne (Kelly Harrison) who sums up the ethos of the salon she has been running incompetently towards bankruptcy: “It’s not about looks, it’s about self-esteem, it’s a passport to selfie heaven. It’s a facelift for your life”.

In reality, her husband and salon owner Teddy (Robson Green) despairs of her and is in actually love with her frumpier sister, Bel (Polly Walker), who is returning to the salon to run it (properly) now that she’s packed her kids off to university. Bel loves her dishy husband, Wesley (James Murray), but maybe has a bit of a thing for Teddy, who she lost to Leanne many years and tears back.

So far, so routine. It could be an episode of Coronation Street spiked with some Love Island-style preening. What happens next, though, we discover by stages, is that Wesley has been having an affair with a younger personal trainer Lorelei (Madeleine Mantock), but that it’s in fact a put-up job by Teddy, who wants to smash the marriage up so that she’ll run off with him, and Lorelei is the unwitting instrument of his evil plan, manipulated, in turn, by her “friend” Dante. Presumably. Either that or he’s quite the sadist.

This is challengingly complex in the way doing a Super Sudoku is, but less rewarding than the popular Japanese numbers puzzle. First, it is just absurdly convoluted, even by the standards of untaxing BBC1 popular drama serials about a bunch of brassy, sassy but not necessarily classy women… etc. I mean, why doesn’t he just ask her out, or find some less slightly less cumbersome and risky method of getting a bit chummier with his sister-in-law/old flame. I’ve met some devious sods in my time, I can tell you, but none that indulged in that degree of over-engineering in their knavish trickery.

Second, the Teddy character is an utterly unconvincing spouse for Leanne. He is an accountant, which is bad enough; but they’ve gone beyond reason and made him ridiculously square. The glam Leanne just wouldn’t spend decades with him in an apparently happy marriage. In one scene he was wearing a maroon v-necked sweater of a style not seen outside an Age UK shop since about 1992, teamed with one of those thick big checked shirts that farmers favour. Sat there tapping away on his calculator, he seems an extremely unlikely partner for a woman whose glorious self-description is: “filler queen, botox bitch and go-to girl for full facial rejuvenation”.

By contrast, nice but saggy Bel is the one who’s landed the stereotypical hunky but dull joiner, Wes (James Murray) who really does look like he ought to be in a remake of that advert for jeans where the bloke gets his keks off in the launderette. (I had a friend do that once and he got a caution. Once again, it’s one law for a drunken idiot on Saffron Lane, Leicester, and another for a model in a global hit Levi’s commercial featuring “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”).

For the viewer there’s a lot of soap-style relationship wrangling but not much more than soap-standard levels of credibility. You get the background noise of society’s eugenics-light obsession with looks and youth but, you know, believe me, some of us know all about that already.

It would be unreasonable to expect kitchen-sink gritty realism to rise from the keyboard of Debbie Horsfield, but I’d expect to find myself a bit more bothered about the protagonists. For example, the attempt, waveringly, to make Wes the innocent victim of an succubus than just another randy tradesman on the job left us confused, as he made out, Partridge-style with a woman 14 years younger than him. Back of the net!

Lisa Riley was in there too, not sure why, and it was lovely to see Sue Johnston doing a turn as the unhappy sisters’ libertine mum, Ivy-Rae and wife of Chizzler, a Mancunian Davros, but minus the urbane charm, played by Struan Rodger. Sue/Ivy-Rae introduced herself as the one in charge of “tanning, waxing, dogging – the last one by appointment only”. Yet I always thought that that was the point about dogging – no appointment needed. You can just turn up at your local nature park and expect to be entertained, though I’m thinking it may not always live up to expectations, and you may well find yourself appalled. Like a Debbie Horsfield BBC1 drama, I suppose.

Fool that I am, I thought I’d be able to get through First-Time Call Girl without getting upset. It’s inevitable, however. This, the first for four episodes about how women end up being sex workers and filmed in the sort of jolly reality TV style that we’ve all become so used to – not so very different to, say, one of the many programmes featuring Alan Titchmarsh and/or a dilapidated member of the royal family.

But prostitution is no subject for light entertainment, and, by the end, I quite agreed with young Alexis who declared herself “feeling extremely scared” to be going into that world. Even at £150 per hour, it’s not worth it. Try working in a beauty salon instead.