Fake, ITV1 review - be careful what you wish for

The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series. 

Adapted by screenwriter Anya Beyersdorf from the eponymous memoir by Stephanie Wood, Fake is the story of a relationship between Joe Burt (David Wenham), apparently a divorced business entrepreneur and farmer forever juggling a variety of property schemes and financial deals, and 50-ish food journalist Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie), who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time not writing very much for her newspaper.

They first meet via a dating app, but Birdie is nervous and apprehensive and cuts short their first meeting at a restaurant. Yet she still decides to meet him again – possibly goaded by the advice of her hard-boiled mother Margeaux (Heather Mitchell), who advises her daughter that “you need to be realistic about what’s still out there” – and their liaison seems to proceed almost inadvertently. Birdie’s nervousness is somewhat soothed by the reasonable and sympathetic tone of Joe’s bombardment of calls and texts. After various delays and false starts, he takes her to his rustic farmhouse nestling amid some idyllic countryside, and Birdie starts to become convinced that he might be the real deal.

Yet, even though Birdie’s therapist advises that “you might just have to trust Joe”, his story never quite hangs together. He’s forever changing arrangements at the last moment thanks to unforeseen calamities (eg his son has had an accident or his ex-wife is having a medical “episode”), or he may suddenly turn up unannounced in the middle of the night. When Birdie plans to take her mother out to dinner on her first wedding anniversary since her husband’s death, Joe gazumps the event by insisting they join him for a twilight cruise on his boat instead. Needless to say, he fails to rise to the occasion.

The story develops slowly over its eight episodes, perhaps a little too slowly for our binge-crazy streaming era, but the comparatively sedate pace offers space for the drama to accumulate a mounting sense of insecurity and apprehension, even if the ceaseless barrage of pings from Birdie’s phone as yet more messages arrive from Joe does become exasperating. We know from the show’s title that Birdie’s anxieties are justified, but Keddie’s portrayal of a woman fearing that she’s emotionally beached in middle age while battling neurotically against her intuition that things just ain’t right gradually ratchets up the stress on your nerve-endings. Keddie plays her insecurity with poignancy and great skill, sleepwalking towards disaster before eventually facing the realisation that the yearned-for romantic idyll is turning into a scorched-earth nightmare. Though she might have paid closer attention to a warning from a friend, which consisted of the single word “Run”.

Wenham, too, puts on a finely-tuned display as Joe, effortlessly schmoozing Birdie with well-rehearsed sincerity or putting on displays of righteous indignation when she dares to question his behaviour. There’s a degree of pathos in the way the story eventually unravels and some facts are laid bare, but one message you might take from it is “turn your bloody phone off”.

• Fake is on ITV1 on Saturday nights, and all episodes are available on ITVX

• More TV on theartsdesk