The stern and glowering demeanour of David Morrissey’s character, Michael Polly, looms over this six-part drama like the embodiment of a malignant fate. Polly is the headmaster of St Bartholomew’s private school in Bristol, a vintage establishment replete with cloisters, venerable and palatial buildings and playing fields that seem to stretch for miles (Downside School in Somerset was the actual shooting location.)
You might say Polly is married to his job, because he runs the school with a devotion that borders on the fanatical. As well as being the stone-faced figurehead of the establishment, the acme of old-school and almost Old Testament probity, he takes a special interest in coaching the 1st XV rugby squad, which he does with a single-minded relentlessness that makes Steve Borthwick look like the part-time coach of a local pub team. Polly is especially keen to wring the best out of one of his players, Dylan Sedgwick (Billy Barratt). He can sense potential greatness in him, and he’s not going to allow him to waste it, not least because it will bring extra prestige to St Bartholomew’s. But Dylan isn’t too enthusiastic about Polly’s humourless, martinet-style discipline.
Polly is also married to his wife Sarah, but the problem is she’s gone missing. Soon the police are snooping around, and as the husband of the vanished woman, Polly is inevitably a person of interest. He disclaims all knowledge of her fate or her whereabouts, but his sluggishness in reporting her missing raises a red flag or two. His daughter Alana (Emma Appleton), also a teacher at the school, is appalled and baffled by his seeming lack of concern for her mother.
The mystery (scripted by George Kay) will unravel itself in due course, but Gone keeps its grip on your attention with its interplay of character and situation as much as with the mere mechanics of the police investigation. Eve Myles excels in the role of DS Annie Cassidy, who gradually begins to figure out Michael’s closed and secretive personality in her post as family liaison officer on the case.
The suspicion that she’s been assigned to that relatively banal role by DI Pemberley (Arthur Hughes) because he’s a male chauvinist numbskull isn’t dwelt upon, but merely sizzles quietly in the background. The subsidiary narrative of Annie’s fractured relationship with her husband and fellow-cop Craig (Peter McDonald), who we sense is the kind of guy who enjoys exerting a little coercive control behind closed doors, throws some more oblique light on the topic of other people’s relationships and the unknowableness thereof.
In the end, the story turns out to be a tragic one, but not only in the ways you might have expected. Through Morrissey’s superbly sustained slow-burn performance, we gradually come to understand something of the nature of Mr Polly, a man so committed to upholding the historic values of St Bartholomew’s that they’ve trapped him like a kind of iron mask. Indeed, he recalls how he and Sarah were warned by the previous headmaster to avoid letting the job take over their lives – but “we didn’t get out in time”.
Revelations from Sarah’s diaries, where she describes her husband as “boring Michael who everyone laughs at”, throw a piercing and pathetic light on a man who was probably born about 100 years too late. A man out of time indeed.
Episodes 5 and 6 of Gone on ITV1 at 9pm on March 22 and 23. All episodes streaming on ITVX
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