TV Pick of the Week: Rain Dogs - Review by Yvette Huddleston

The opening episode is undeniably bleak with warm, loving, resilient single mother Costello (the excellent Daisy May Cooper) and her young daughter Iris (a mature, assured performance from newcomer Fleur Tashjian) being evicted from their council flat for rent arrears. Costello is bright, talented, university educated and dreams of becoming a writer; circumstances are against her and the poverty trap is holding her back. She works nights at a seedy peep show in order to get enough money together to secure a new place to live for herself and her daughter. We see them desperately trailing around London looking for somewhere to sleep – and their options are beginning to dwindle…

Meanwhile Costello’s best friend Florian Selby (Jack Farthing), privileged, upper class, entitled (so not an immediately sympathetic character), has just been released from prison and is keen to get back in touch with Costello and Iris. At first, Costello resists relying on him as she has been let down by him in the past, but he soon proves his worth as a friend when he rescues her and Iris from a potentially dangerous situation – a situation they have found themselves in out of desperation. Carraway’s script has plenty to say about the state of the country, class and sex inequality, and the way in which the most vulnerable in our society have effectively been abandoned.

There are some cracking supporting turns from the likes of Anna Chancellor as Selby’s monster of a mother Allegra, Adrian Edmonson as a dying once controversial artist who Costello knows as a peep show client and Ronke Adekoluejo as her wild partying mate Gloria. Throughout Carraway’s writing blends warmth, (sometimes bawdy) humour and wit with unapologetically frank observations on social injustice and the difficulties faced by those who are forced onto the margins of society by tough circumstances beyond their control. Ultimately this is a meditation on the importance of friendship, trust, love and how you can create your own alternative family, one that will always be there through the good times and the bad. In that sense it is both uplifting and incredibly moving.