Tom Hollander: New drama Us can bring comfort and escapism in these testing times

The actor stars in the BBC's adaptation of David Nicholls's hit novel
Us: Hollander, Saskia Reeves and Tom Taylor in the new BBC drama
BBC/Drama Republic/Colin Hutton
Tom Hollander17 September 2020

Actors were, in a sense, already match-fit for lockdown. It’s an idle thought and understates all the many varieties of misery the country has been plunged into, but sitting at home with nothing to do except consider the disintegration of the polar ice caps is something actors are used to. Even well-known ones eternally emerge from and return to “the primordial slime” of unemployment (Simon Callow). Consequently they develop coping strategies for filling time: a lot of yoga. Day-drinking. Writing Fleabag.

Clearly the most efficient way of escaping your immediate circumstances is to turn on the TV. For actors this is problematic because there’s every chance they may see something brilliant which they are not in, which makes them feel worse. Or they might see something brilliant which they are actually in, but in which they are bad; or something bad that they are in, in which they are no better. So it’s lose/lose, hence their tendency to write screenplays instead. Which hopefully they can both be in and be not bad.

But for everyone else, watching stories on TV is a good escape. Some offer a reality wildly different from your own. Others reassure you with something more familiar. Us, as the title suggests, is one of these.

It’s about a family holiday in Europe. The sort of holiday people may even have planned to go on this summer. It’s also a story about a wife and a son and a father who are struggling with a family dynamic that is tiring them all and in the midst of which they dream of escape. Sound familiar?

BBC Studios/Drama Republic Ltd/Colin Hutton

The son (Tom Taylor as Albie; brilliant) is desperate to get to college and start a life for himself. The wife (Saskia Reeves as Connie; brilliant), facing an empty nest, wants to get out of the marriage and find a new life for herself before it’s too late. And really the only thing stopping them is husband and father Douglas Petersen (um… I enjoyed doing it), who is trying to hold his little family together, because he quite likes the reality he’s in, and doesn’t want to lose it. And he loves them. In fact they all love each other. That’s what makes it hard.

It’s a sort of reverse rom-com. Instead of watching people who love each other try to get together, we watch people who love each other try to break up. I won’t spoil the ending. It’s also slightly a holiday from hell. So if you were deprived of a trip abroad this summer, you may be relieved to see how bad it could have been.

David Nicholls’s writing is witty and charming and touching. The four episodes, deftly directed by director Geoffrey Sax, take place in two time periods. The present, in which Connie wants to leave Douglas, and back in the Nineties when they first met and got together. Their younger selves are played by Gina Bramhill (brilliant) and Iain De Caesteker (brilliant). And in each episode the story swings back and forth at delicately chosen moments, to show us what time has done to them. It’s clever, and it’s kind. David’s script is what drew everyone, and is the star of the show. And for anyone who got together in the Nineties and now has nearly adult children... well there’s a lot they’ll recognise. So might the children.

We shot it last summer. In Europe, in what seems like a bygone age, where we did all those things that film crews and tourists used to do like cram ourselves into packed minibuses and train carriages and jostle through tourist hubs and sit too close to each other while eating. If you do feel like revisiting the very recent old world without leaving your sofa, you might enjoy it.

BBC Studios/Drama Republic Ltd/Colin Hutton

If by the way, you believe the performing arts are worth protecting, it’s because the giving and receiving of stories can save you. The sharing of the common problem of being alive. TV does this and so does the theatre — for several thousand years now and on a much smaller budget. And theatre is often where TV draws its talent in the first place, people like David Nicholls.

The Government, with its £1.57 billion rescue package for the arts, has made a huge contribution to saving the institutions themselves. But for the people who actually work in theatres, the majority of whom do not earn a living wage, this Covid time is an existential threat. As it is for so many sectors, I realise, but this is the one I know.

The vast majority of the theatre community are not on a six-figure salary from Netflix with a regular role in a Marvel franchise. They have long been used to subsidising themselves with a side hustle. Out-of-work theatre people work in restaurants, Robert de Niro owns restaurants — it’s a sliding scale of side hustle.

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But the problem is, with the side hustles going bust (not Nobu, don’t panic completely) very many freelancers are making decisions now that will trade in their hustle for a full-time job (if they can find one) effectively taking them out of the industry entirely. And we won’t have a representative theatre and film industry in 2030 if the only young creatives to make it through the Covid pandemic were those who were cushioned by a trust fund or a buy-to-let portfolio. So forgive a little begging here, but I’m not on social media so can’t do it there.

I contribute to the Royal Theatrical Fund, which in 1991 paid for me to have a knee operation privately so I wouldn’t miss a theatre tour that I had been offered while waiting for the operation: Celia in As You Like It — a great part in a much-loved production. So I am forever grateful to them. The RTF was founded by Charles Dickens and has quietly supported the profession ever since.

Now it has gone into an arrangement with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Olivia Colman to create something called the Theatre Community Fund. It’s a hardship fund — if you’re in the mood, the website is here.

And if you’re in the mood to watch Us, it’s on BBC1 from Sunday night.

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