Everyone’s heard of Cosy Crime, but so far no one has yet come up with a good soubriquet for the particular brand of domestic noir – though in truth, it’s less noir than a Little Greene shade of dark grey – that still proliferates just as wildly in publishing. You know the kind of thing I mean. Such stories aren’t cosy, exactly; they star no vicars at evensong, no retirement homes in sleepy villages. But nor are they what you’d call edgy.
Picture, if you will, a £50,000 kitchen. This gleaming space, with its expansive counters and blonde wood dining table, could not be more aspirational if it tried – and yet, on some level, it represents Innocence. It is a nest, albeit an immaculate one, and soon it will be visited by the inevitable Cuckoo, who’ll do something awful to its owners, thereby committing a crime against happiness that goes far beyond failing to recycle one’s Nespresso pods.
Playing Nice, a new series on ITV, is a “psychological thriller” (henceforth to be known in these parts as a Sourdough Screamer) based on a 2020 novel by J P Delaney, which is the pseudonym of a man called Tony who – surprise! – used to be big in advertising. It comes with a luxe, good-looking cast in the form of Niamh Algar, Jessica Brown Findlay, James McArdle and James Norton, atmospheric Cornish locations, and a plot that turns on the discovery by two couples that their toddler sons were swapped in a hospital mix-up after their birth. In the end, though, it’s the kitchens that flash red. Delaney gives us three of the damn things – one per couple, plus another that belongs to a hip restaurant with sweeping sea views – and even the homiest among them looks like it will do for the pages of World of Interiors.
Uh-oh, you think, gazing at all the highly frangible branded champagne flutes. Trouble is clearly ahead, and may even now be lurking among the linseeds in the Plain English-style pantry. When the two couples – Pete the former journalist (Norton) and his top chef wife Maddie (Algar); Miles the architect (McArdle) and his artist wife Lucy (Findlay) – meet to discuss their difficult situation, their bonhomie would be tinny even if their chat wasn’t so preposterous. (At Miles’ and Lucy’s enormous self-build, Maddie recognises one of Lucy’s paintings. “Yes,” replies Lucy, casually. “It was in the Royal Academy years ago!”) Someone’s the Cuckoo here, after all. But then, mere minutes later, Miles arrives at Maddie and Pete’s far smaller place with a tricycle for their (his) boy, Theo, and the game is up. Of course it’s him, the self-satisfied Mamil with a penchant for security cameras!
Hospitals do make mistakes; baby swaps have occurred before now. But Delaney and his adapter, Grace Ofori-Attah, aren’t interested in plausibility, let alone complexity. Confused, primal feelings to do with blood and love are superseded here first by monied snobbery – Miles and Lucy are richer and more sophisticated than Pete and Maddie – and then by what seems to be borderline psychopathy (I can’t be sure because I’ve only seen two episodes). Miles’s name says it all. M-I-L-E-S. He’s one of those superior crazies who chooses to holiday in Norfolk when he could afford the Maldives, but who also imagines that people who live in houses with only three bedrooms belong to some kind of dangerous, drug-addicted underclass.
So why did I keep watching? In part, it’s the season. The non-challenges in Playing Nice’s non-twists and non-turns are just the thing for a long, dry January. Mostly, though, it’s the fact that watching a superior cast inhabit such ridiculous material is my kind of good, clean, twisted fun. If Norton is a million miles from Happy Valley here – “O’im goin’ to keep ew safe, Theo!” – a universe stands between McArdle and his performances on stage (oh, but he was brilliant in the Old Vic’s recent revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing). First, the oozing line, delivered with an unctuous smile. Then, back turned, the silent snarl and the darting eyes. He’s behind you, dressed in Nike leggings! For anyone who keeps a pasta machine in a box in a cupboard under the stairs, it seems that panto season isn’t over quite yet.
[See also: “Better Man” review: Robbie Williams’ anti-redemption arc]
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