Does every generation suffer its own form of doomsday paranoia? In Stephen Poliakoff’s BBC Two drama Summer of Rockets, it’s the late 1950s and everybody’s convinced they’re about to perish in a nuclear holocaust. In this penultimate episode of Russell T Davies’s Years and Years (BBC One), the near-ish future was being sucked into a hideous vortex of Biblical plagues (power blackouts and 80 days of rain), terrorist bombings and a global wave of fascistic governments.
Davies is an ingenious weaver of narrative spells, and as the series peaks he’s escalating the shocks and terrifying revelations. Last week brought Danny Lyons’s tragic attempt to rescue his lover Viktor from stateless limbo in Spain, prompting a disastrous Channel crossing which left 17 bodies washed up on the English coast. One of them was Danny’s.
The event has cast a pall of misery over the Lyons clan. Originally they looked like Britain’s most right-on soap opera family, covering a fashionably inclusive range of sexual orientations, disabilities and political attitudes, but it’s all falling apart now. Stephen (Rory Kinnear), having suffered public humiliation over his affair with Elaine (Rachel Logan), who he doesn’t even like very much, has become a grovelling yes-man to the entrepreneur Woody (Kieran O’Brien), who’s like a cartoon asset-stripper left over from the 1980s. Jonjo and Fiona’s relationship has been blossoming, but their mobile snack bar project has been derailed by draconian legislation which has left them imprisoned in a Criminal Zone. Bethany (Lydia West) is delighted that she’s been converted into a cyber-human with built-in web access, but her father Stephen despairs that she’s now a state-controlled electronic tool.
Davies’s intentions are partly satirical, with his riffs on “fake news” or Russian conspiracies, but darkness is closing in. If it might once have seemed that Years and Years was merely another lament about Brexit, it has developed into something more like the end-of-days visions of Hieronymus Bosch. Both rich and poor are now locked into their own secured estates. Galloping technological advances make it possible for families to hold instant networked conferences or (for instance) for grandma Muriel (Anne Reid, pictured above) to have a miracle cure (at a price) for her failing eyesight, but has also brought the breath-test ID system and other repressive forms of social control.
The stakes keep spiralling higher. While Edith (Jessica Hynes) investigated rumours about the “disappeared” people known as “erstwhiles”, Stephen went one better – he was in the room when manic Prime Minister Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson) spelled out plans for genocide. The most damning part of it was that Stephen saw this as his opportunity for personal vengeance. The final episode ought to make interesting viewing.
