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Truelove review: With the spirit of a police procedural, this isn’t your typically mawkish euthanasia drama

Lindsay duncan and clarke peters star in this twisty thriller exploring the ethics of assisted dying, subscribe to independent premium to bookmark this article.

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Resolve is a luxury of the year’s early months and our still attainable resolutions. But how do we stick with a promise when it becomes harder to keep, more unfathomable to fulfil? This is the question faced by a group of elderly friends in Channel 4 ’s mercurial new mercy-killing drama, Truelove .

Attending the funeral of a mutual friend, old flames Phil ( Lindsay Duncan ) and Ken ( Clarke Peters ) find themselves reconnecting after decades apart. He’s spent a career in the shadowy world of the military, while she’s retired following a successful stint in the police force. Over drinks at the pub alongside a few old muckers, the group find themselves drawn into a strange pact. “If I get anywhere near that, take me out the back and shoot me,” Phil says of the deceased who had fought debilitating cancer. And that’s just what they agree to do: “true love” becomes their codename for a shared, half-joking obligation to put one another out of their misery. “Ken can bump us off,” says ex-doctor David ( Peter Egan ), “and Phil can cover it.” The perfect crime.

From then on, it is a case of Chekhov’s suicide pact. One by one, the signatories of the pub agreement find themselves beset by ailments. First up is Tom ( Hot Fuzz ’s Karl Johnson) who finds himself battling the “full English” of cancer diagnoses. But what friend would possibly risk their life and liberty to fulfil a drunken, semi-bantering promise? This is the question explored over four episodes by writers Iain Wetherby and Charlie Covell (no stranger to pitch-black scenarios after co-writing The End of the F***ingWorld ). It’s a premise that laces the potential mawkishness of a euthanasia drama with the spirit of a police procedural – and the twist of a serial killer saga.

At Truelove ’s heart is Lindsay Duncan, who is on imperious form as a retired copper with little left to lose. She enters proceedings in a black convertible, puffing on a cigarette and wearing dark sunglasses – a long way from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or any other fuddy-duddy depictions of older life. In the absence of a manufacturing industry or any natural resources, Britain’s greatest export may well be its older female actors. And Duncan is a consistently underrated part of that output. She is harder than Judi Dench, colder than Penelope Wilton, more taciturn than Maggie Smith, with the flawless ability to move between brittle and steely modes. Next to her, Peters – a veteran American actor, best known for The Wire – feels necessarily diminished.

That said, there is something a bit weird about Truelove ’s premise. Last festive season, we were treated to a BBC adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies , about a friendship that ends with a trip to Switzerland for an assisted suicide. Where that was an emotionally brutal but deeply conventional look at end-of-life care, Truelove is far pulpier and commensurately less affecting. The tonal shift between the first episode’s opening act and its closing one will leave some viewers with whiplash. As the series progresses, the role of a young police officer, played by Scottish actor Kiran Sonia Sawar, becomes more important, and the question changes from whether you should offer a painless death to someone begging for help, to whether you can get away with it if you do.

Still, with its excellent cast and unusual, if scattershot, tone, Truelove has a lot more to say than most of the limited-series dramas we were served over Christmas. On the subject of ageing, it is unsentimental in a way that few shows are. “Everybody knows it goes,” Phil tells her husband (Phil Davis), counting off the stages of geriatric life. “Bungalow, hospice, crematorium.” When she visits the dreaded bungalow of an old friend, he warns her against downsizing. “You start moving into smaller and smaller boxes,” he says. “Soon they’ll be measuring you up for your wooden overcoat.” Whether it is surreptitious fags in the garden, half-cut flirtations, or embarking on a spree of mercy killings, Truelove is about raging, not going gently, into that good night.

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Truelove review: Timely assisted dying drama that leaves one question unanswered, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS FOR THE DAILY MAIL

Published: 20:16 EST, 3 January 2024 | Updated: 20:21 EST, 3 January 2024

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The Great Rhino Robbery

Lying in a hospital bed after a failed attempt to hang himself, and riddled with cancer , old Tom (Karl Johnson) summed up the bitter irony of his predicament.

'I'm on suicide watch,' he growled, 'and also 'Do Not Resuscitate'.'

That's the contradiction of current laws on terminal illnesses: doctors will let your own body kill you, but they are not allowed to step in and speed up the process.

Meanwhile, anyone who assists a suicide, even by accompanying a loved one to a clinic such as Dignitas in Switzerland, is vulnerable to prosecution.

In the darkly comic drama Truelove (Ch4), Tom's closest friends go much further than that. Giving in to his pleas, Phil and Ken (Lindsay Duncan and Clarke Peters) take him out for a picnic at sea. Then, at his request, they suffocate him with a plastic bag and scuttle the boat.

Phil and Ken (Lindsay Duncan and Clarke Peters) in Channel 4's Truelove

These are desperate measures. The implication is that, because the law prevents kinder mercies, real friends will be driven to such extremes — though why Tom can't simply wrap himself in a wet blanket, jump overboard and drown is not made clear.

He and his lifelong pals have already watched another of their number die slowly and in agony from cancer. 'You wouldn't let your dog suffer like that,' mutters retired GP David (Peter Egan).

Written by Iain Weatherby and directed by Chloe Wicks, it's an immensely powerful piece of television, with a superb cast that also includes Sue Johnston and Phil Davis. That drunken but unbreakable pact forged by the friends, to save each other from protracted deaths no matter what the cost, is convincing and believable.

It's timely, too. Dame Esther Rantzen, who has incurable cancer, is campaigning for a debate on assisted dying to be held in the Commons. The actress Susan Hampshire has added her voice to the calls.

But there's a parallel contradiction that the drama and the campaign fail to acknowledge. Thanks to the spotlight on mental health issues, support for young people beset by suicidal thoughts has never been more open and available.

It's an uneasy double standard, to give the young more of the help they need and deserve, while arguing that the old should have the right to be hurried to the grave when they're feeling suicidal.

God forbid that society ever treats people with terminal illnesses as animals to be euthanised, like the dog in Truelove's analogy.

The drama also underestimates the traumatic effect on those left behind. Tom doesn't just want his friends around him when he dies — he demands that they kill him.

Suicide is an escape from pain, mental or physical. But too often that pain is left behind as an unwanted bequest to others, in the form of grief and guilt. In asking whether we have a right to be helped to die on demand, Truelove has not yet discussed whether we have any right to impose our suffering on others.

Despite beginning strongly, the Great Rhino Robbery soon lost its way, getting bogged down in other scams run by gangs including overcharging for laying tarmac drives

One spurious cure for cancer was highlighted in The Great Rhino Robbery (Sky Documentaries). Horn from these endangered creatures has become so rare that it now sells on the black market at higher prices than gold, in China and south-east Asia.

This documentary began strongly, with shocking statistics about the mass slaughter of rhinos and CCTV footage of thieves raiding natural history museums around Europe to hack the horns off stuffed exhibits.

But it lost its way, getting bogged down in other scams run by gangs — including, bizarrely, travelling navvies overcharging for laying tarmac drives.

Confusion mounted in the interview with a Vietnamese quack who claimed the powdered horn did confer some health benefits. The upshot was well-meaning but a waste of time.

Endless soap of the week: Freeview station That's TV 2 has launched, dedicated to reshowing all of Home And Away from its debut in 1989. Bosses describe this as 'a complete nostalgia fest'. Now, how about a channel devoted to 24-hour-a-day classic Corrie?

Share or comment on this article: Truelove review: Timely assisted dying drama that leaves one question unanswered, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

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Season 1 – Truelove

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Superbly acted and carried off with a light touch, Truelove is a deeply moving treatise on mortality.

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