Years and Years review, episode 3: A nice sense of the absurd

There’s a tough-sounding northern woman politician on the telly. She’s talking about “hard-working families”. She wants a political system that isn’t about looking after the banks, but “the rest of us normal people”. She swears, like the man and woman in the street or the pub. She specialises in “hard talk and hard truths”. She cries “shame on any politician who ever let our soldiers down”.

She’s Vivienne “Viv” Rook, hard-bitten charlatan populist of the near future, superbly conjured up by Emma Thompson in Years and Years (BBC1). Rarely has such paper-thin cynicism been projected so insidiously.

It’s that good, it could be Esther McVey. It could be today. Or the day after tomorrow.

The danger of mere extrapolation of the present into the future is that it is just more of the same. So it is with Russell T Davies’s drama, about the near future. For all its many virtues – stellar cast, fine scripts, a nice sense of the absurd – it often feels too much like 2019 on steroids. This tends to make the narrative just a touch facile.

Still, it has its moments. The adolescent Bethany (Lydia West) aspires to be “transhuman” and is on a quest to convert herself into a laptop, so that she can live forever. Now her friend Lizzie (Shannon Hayes) has a glass eye that doubles as a bionic digital camera installed as a first step on the road to what you might call transhumanity. But this contraption malfunctions so badly that it just revolves around her eye socket uncontrollably. Tragic, in its way, I suppose, but it means she reminds me a bit of the boggle-eyed Laurel and Hardy straight man James Finlayson.

We’ve got as far as 2026 now, following the story of the sprawling Lyons family, whose members are overwhelmingly united by a liberal outlook but not much else.

Most of the family are having their lives wrecked – by events outside their control. Thus, Daniel’s refugee Ukrainian boyfriend Viktor (Maxim Baldry) persecuted by Russian occupiers in his homeland, has now found asylum in socialist Spain, in a regime so liberal that they have a “conjugal suite” in their detention centres. As ever, Russell Tovey as Daniel is excellent at portraying the trauma of a man separated from the love of his life. If the point that LGBT+ rights are in danger, and have a real emotional cost, then it is well taken, but I fear we know it already.

Daniel’s brother, Stephen (Rory Kinnear), has lost £1m and the family home in a 2008-style crash, and has to get a job as a bicycle courier – or a “lifestyle enhancer”, as his boss corrects him. A former rich banker, he has been reduced to moving in with his old mum (Anne Reid) and joining the “gig economy”. The employment rules are explained to him by his manager: “Fifty pence per parcel. If it’s more than 60 minutes it won’t be paid. No holidays. No sick pay. No argument.”

He seems surprisingly cheerful about this, perhaps because being a courier, sorry lifestyle enhancer, gives him more freedom to indulge in an unexplained affair – his infidelity undertaken with the sort of insouciance you’d usually associate with a straying Premier League footballer or American president. But for Stephen, it seems out of character.

Meanwhile, sister Rosie (Ruth Madeley) loses her job as a dinner lady because, as her supervisor explains: “the banks collapse, the government bails them out, they take the money off us” (the schools). Succinct, that, if itself a bit of a populist, simplistic line. So Rosie is skint too now, like the rest of the Lyons.

Enter “Viv” Rook, cynically manipulating a bewildered public, offering saloon-bar wisdom and a full platter of scapegoats and false promises.

One bizarre proposal, as suggested on her own TV station (shades of Berlusconi) is to boost the British wine industry with tax breaks and subsidies, financed by a tariff on foreign wines. “They’ll pay” is her answer to where the money will come from – scarily similar to Trump’s recent economically illiterate claims about the US-China trade war. “British wine for British people”, she declares tipsily. Viv also wants to limit the right to vote to those with an IQ of more than 70, and she ends up with the balance of power in a hung parliament after the 2026 general election. Ever ballsy, she refuses to do any back-room deals with the Tories or Labour: “On every vote they can come to me and I will decide.”

So, Years and Years mirrors the black world of the present too closely. It is clever enough, but just a bit too much like now to be a believable future. Maybe it should have been a world that we would find incredible today: run by moderate social democrats, religious and political extremism confined to the margins, terrorism in retreat, human rights flourishing, free trade, climate change reversed, free beer. Cheer up. It might happen.