This BBC show about Miri’s return home after 18 years in prison is a pure and painful delight, which can move you from tears to laughter within a single line
We pick up with thirtysomething ex-con Miri Matteson (played by Daisy Haggard, co-creator of this comedy-drama with Laura Solon) for the second series of Back to Life (BBC Three/iPlayer) just a few weeks on from when we left her. She is now six weeks into life as a free woman – bar her mandatory meetings with her probation officer, Janice (Jo Martin, still lethally brilliant in a part that has been beefed up this go-round, surely in recognition of everything she did the first time) – and things are … OK. Miri is keeping her Tamagotchi alive, is taking driving lessons, is about to start a trial run as a supermarket employee and is still friends-with-benefits with neighbour Billy (Adeel Akhtar). The benefits are basically food-based (or, as Janice puts it, “You haven’t even seen his cocky yet”). After last series’ ice-cream cones, they move on in the first episode of the new to a sandwich lunch on the freezing Hythe shoreline. But the oh-so-gradual evolution of this, the daftest, tenderest relationship on television, is what makes it such a pure and painful delight. It manages to crush and swell the heart all at once.
On the other hand, Miri is still trying to come to terms with the revelations about her best friend Mandy’s (Christine Bottomley) involvement in the crime for which Miri served 18 years in prison, and her mother’s adulterous affair with Miri’s ex-boyfriend Dom (Jamie Michie); all while learning how to use the internet and smartphones, and restoring a bank account she hasn’t used for two decades.
