Years and Years review, episode 2: Engaging and terrifying in equal parts, but hard to remember who’s related to who, and how

The thing about Years and Years (BBC1), Russell T Davies’s short guide to an unstable near future, is that it is all too plausible. And, thus, engaging and terrifying, in equal parts. Not just the idea of a President Pence (with Trump still pulling the strings), who is referred to in passing; or a Farage-style populist winning elections (Emma Thompson’s icy charlatan Viv Rook); or that America and China might come close to an all-out nuclear war. But also that the adolescents of the future, will be part-human, part Huawei smartphone.

This is because their mobiles are so much a part of them, as we see now, that they actually start to have the components, called “skinplants”, installed in their bodies. So that the internationally recognised gesture people do to indicate being on the phone becomes a reality, with a thumb as the earpiece and little finger as a mic. Still, I guess that means no one can ever nick it.

Even the primitive love robot, Keith, who we met in the first episode last week was believable, though his sexual technique probably needed refinement. I’m looking forward to seeing how Keith 2.0, the next generation, gets on with pleasuring his master.

The story of the 2020s is told through the extended Lyons family, already introduced to us at some length in the opening episode. Baby Lincoln is still too young to be able to take much interest in what’s going on, but his uncles and aunties certainly do.

Take Auntie Edith (Jessica Hynes), an eco-warrior who, from a beach in Vietnam, witnesses the detonation of a thermonuclear device that Donald Trump lobs at Hong Sha Dao in the final days of his second term of office. This is one of those artificial islands the Chinese are building in the South China Sea for purposes of projecting power, intimidating its smaller neighbours and territorial expansion. (Put like that I suppose you can sympathise with Trump, but I’d better let that thought rest there.)

The rest of the world doesn’t agree with Trump and hits the US with unprecedented sanctions for its “aggression”, with consequences that will soon be visited upon the Lyons family. It’s all told with the usual devices of made-up television news reports and the like. And, after Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and all the rest, the Years and Years team have plenty of recent archives of devastation to draw upon.

Edith survives, but, sailing close to the centre of the blast (it leaves 45,000 dead), she picks up some radiation exposure, something she tries to hide from her family but fails. Earnest and sincere, and much as we might admire her bravery, she is a bit of a two-dimensional figure, so far.

In a TV interview, Edith pleads with some passion, for the economic sanctions on America, and for a future of a planet we know is dying: “The world keeps getting hotter and faster and madder, and we don’t pause, we don’t think, we don’t learn, we just keep racing to the next disaster. And I keep wondering where are we going, when’s it gonna stop?”

Well, where we are going, is that the sanctions Edith is so keen on, mean that her brother Stephen’s (Rory Kinnear) job with an investment bank disappears, as do the banks. His family loses their home and all of their money in a 2008-style financial crash. Actually, 1929-style, given that they lose everything and there is no government bailout.

His partner Celeste (T’Nia Miller), by the way, has already seen her work as an accountant replaced by artificial intelligence, while daughter Bethany (Lydia West) seems to have given up on going “transhuman” and converting herself into a laptop. Anyhow, now homeless, they don’t quite share Edith’s trendy anti-Americanism.

As I say, it all looks perfectly possible from the vantage point of 2019. The other depressingly realistic theme is the persecution of Viktor (Maxim Baldry), boyfriend of Daniel Lyons (Russell Tovey). Shopped by Daniel’s ex to the immigration authorities for working in a petrol station, Viktor is summarily deported back to a land, Ukraine under Russian occupation, USSR-style, where his sexuality is only tolerated if he “behaves discreetly”.

Soon to be presiding over this broken Britain is Viv Rook. She wins a by-election when the MP for the Northern Powerhouse is accidentally and symbolically decapitated by a giant delivery drone, the “Pride of Manchester”. She and her “Four Star Party”, with the slogan: “I couldn’t give a f***”, have already cast a spell over the habitual Labour-voting Rosie Lyons (Ruth Madeley), but I fear violent disappointment is only a matter of months away.

If Years and Years has a fault, it isn’t so much its wide geopolitical horizons or its playful visions of sweeping new technologies, but the sheer vastness of the Lyons family – every one of them, played by brilliant established or emerging actors. I just can’t remember who’s related to who, and how. It’s worse than the House of Windsor in its sprawling complexity. It is as if Mr Davies and producer Karen Lewis didn’t quite know when to say stop when the casting director was pouring this cornucopia of dramatic talent into their goblets. That said, like any journalist, I want to see what happens next.