Adultery review – a risible tale of middle-aged car sex, rat poo and rickety furniture

Here are a few valuable life lessons to be gathered from the new six-part series Adultery, which is about adultery.

One, don’t bother.

Two, if you do bother, don’t do it with the father of your son’s girlfriend or the mother of your daughter’s boyfriend.

Three, if you do mess around with the father of your son’s girlfriend or the mother of your daughter’s boyfriend, make sure nobody’s got anyone saved in their phone under the moniker “Dickhead Dave”. Because he is not going to help matters.

But Beth (Romola Garai, far too good for this by-the-numbers effort from Danny Brocklehurst) is a bored, beleaguered fortysomething mother of two who has recently lost the personal-trainer business she was passionate about. She is also mourning the loss of her best friend whose husband is facing an assault charge. And Tom (Dominic Cooper, ditto) is a fortysomething father and GP, married to charity fundraiser Hannah (Shelley Conn) who has been struggling with her mental health for a bit. So when Beth comes along, he is helpless before her. They look at each other like two equally stunned halibut, first in a hospital waiting room (they meet when she knocks him off his bike and injures his wrist, the one he uses for foreshadowing), then across a garden party at Tom’s posh home (where Beth – who I should mention is Lancastrian so, you know, darling – trails her fingers reverentially across books! About art! On a shelf! And dreams of a life of getting banged on higher thread counts), and then in his GP surgery before Beth launches herself at him and gets the party started.

Soon they are having sex in cars until Beth remembers her dead best friend kindly left her a house in her will and they could probably prang more comfortably there. Which they do, until disaster strikes! No, that one’s been averted. I hope there isn’t another one coming down the … Oh! This one’s worse. Dave. Such a dickhead.

They have to drive to Tom’s cottage in the Lake District instead. “I’m going to scatter my dead friend’s ashes!” Beth tells her family. “I’m going to clear out the rat poo,” Tom tells Hannah. But the urn and bleach go equally unemptied as the pair opt to go at it on a dangerously rickety hall table instead. I’m not sure if it’s a neighbour we see disappearing behind a fence at one point or a crew member hiding from the increasing embarrassment of seeing people boggle at a bookshelf because they’ve got Northern accents and deliver lines like “Do you ever worry that our best days are behind us?” and “Depression’s for the middle classes, isn’t it?”

Meanwhile, the kids are having a much better time, mainly because they still think sex is a novelty and aren’t trying to have it with anyone but each other. Their idea of a thrill is to bunk off school and go to Blackpool for the day. While their adulterous parents get it on in the surgery for the first time, Ollie and Jess are riding the rollercoaster. Diagnosis: metaphor. As the sun sets, Jess celebrates their perfect day: “I don’t want things to ever change!” “They won’t,” Ollie assures her. Prognosis: terminal.

Adultery, in short, is a clattering bag of cliches delivered by ciphers, despite a host of good actors giving it everything they can. Everywhere you look there are unconvincing people doing unconvincing things. Yes, you think, Dave may well be a dickhead, but would he really take one look at his ex-wife lying in her coffin in the chapel of rest and say “I’ve been inside that body” to Beth? No. Or, if you were about to swim in an isolated lake in the Lake District on a dirty weekend away, would you do it in a swimming costume and trunks? No. Or, if you were a doctor who’d injured your wrist would you not be able to fashion a sling that actually supports it? Yes. Or, would a neurotic like Hannah, who demands a four-way action plan be forged among the parents when Jess is told off for imitating Ollie by cheeking a teacher, really be unbothered about finding out they take edibles together? No.

It all adds up to people it is impossible to believe in or care about. The plot is slight. The attempts at class commentary or the problems of mating in middle-aged captivity are like iron rivets being sledgehammered into a balsa wood miniature. There are great central performances, especially from Garai and Conn, and occasional glimpses of what might have been. But like sex on a rickety table in a rat-shat cottage, Adultery remains hardly worth the effort.