With a title like A Passionate Woman (BBC1) and with Billie Piper, fresh from Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, in the title role, it seemed fair to expect the screen to steam up with some good old-fashioned post-war rumpy pumpy.
But something about this doomed period romance failed to spark.
It wasn’t Piper’s fault. She was the picture of let-me-at-’im libido the minute her dowdy Betty clapped eyes on hunky charmer Craze at the local dancehall.
We were in grim-up-North 1950s Leeds, a land of freezing flats,frustrated marriages and small-minded anti-Semitism.
So it was no wonder the rather too perfectly formed Craze (Theo James, with gym-buff body and perfect teeth – not really a 1950s look) caused something of a stir.
To the endlessly repeated refrain of old Johnny Mathis ditty A Certain Smile, Betty and Craze embarked on an affair we knew was ill-fated from the outset, given that he copped a bullet in the opening credits and the whole thing was told in flashback.
Blocking their route to happiness was the fact they were both trapped in entirely implausible marriages to people they didn’t like, let alone love.
It was such a daft dramatic device that it undercut the gritty realism writer Kay Mellor was clearly striving for, the plot loosely based on her own mother’s life.
‘What I don’t understand is why you married him in the first place,’ Craze told Betty.
‘Because he asked me,’ she sighed back and that was as far as the backstory went.
The real story was intended to be one of sexual awakening, Craze lighting Betty’s blue touchpaper whereas honest plodder hubby Donald didn’t even know where the matches were.
Yet for all the sex up against trees and overheated dialogue (‘when I’m not with you, I feel like I’m dead’, etc) A Passionate Woman never felt, well, particularly passionate.
Craze was too wrapped up in himself and Betty too wrapped in victim mentality to make our earth move.
The half-baked whodunnit – we were kept dangling as to the identity of Craze’s killer – proved more gripping than Betty’s bumping grind towards multiple orgasms.
There’s more to come, with a part two that spins the story 30 years forwards, but I’m finding it hard to care.
I really enjoyed it you had to be young in the 50,to appreciate how it was. Iloved the music costumes the acting of Billie Piper was first class. C’ant wait till next Sunday and I am 66 years old.