Keeley Hawes’s Alice deals with her husband’s death and uncovers sinister secrets in ITV’s uneven new series, which is somewhat saved by the actors playing her parents
The moment in Finding Alice – ITV’s new blackly comic six-part drama – when Joanna Lumley and Nigel Havers turn up as the parents of Keeley Hawes’s Alice briefly pulls the whole universe into alignment. It’s so perfectly, utterly right. Of course Joanna Lumley and Nigel Havers should be together! Yes! Always! And certainly, most absolutely certainly, they should be the parents of Keeley Hawes. You’ll have to watch it. I simply cannot convey to you the delight of seeing this beautiful piece of order suddenly arising out of the chaos of the past year. Enjoy.
The only fly in the ointment is that its perfection throws the instability of the surrounding drama, about a widow uncovering her late husband’s secrets, into sharp relief. A good 15% of it seems to be about curtains, for example, which is fine in a Victoria Wood sketch but less so here.
