Back to Life series 2, BBC3, review: Bleak, profound and charmingly funny

The second series sees Daisy Haggard's Miri holding down a job and pressing on with her relationship with Adeel Akhtar's bashful Billy

Programme Name: Back To Life Series 2 - TX: 31/08/2021 - Episode: n/a (No. 1) - Picture Shows: Miri Matteson (DAISY HAGGARD) - (C) Two Brothers Pictures - Photographer: Luke Varley TV Still BBC

Daisy Haggard, who stars as Miri, also co-wrote the series (Photo: BBC/Two Brothers Pictures/Luke Varley)

August 31, 2021 1:01 pm(Updated 4:13 pm)

After serving an 18-year prison sentence for murder, a woman returns to the grey seaside town where she grew up.

Written down, the premise for Back to Life sounds like the elevator pitch for a classy but depressing HBO drama that might bag Kate Winslet an Emmy nomination.

So it was to the immense credit of Daisy Haggard, who stars in and co-wrote the series, that it was both profound and charmingly funny as it began a second season.

The long-term devastation caused by violent death was not shied away from. Yet as Haggard’s Miri Matteson adjusted to the world outside prison, the comedy also mined the absurdity of everyday life for gentle and contagious laughs

In windswept Hythe, Kent, Miri’s biggest challenge was not holding down a job nor enduring the stares of her neighbours – it was the nagging of her parents (Geraldine James and Richard Durden).

There was a mystery, too, in a comedy shepherded to the screen by Fleabag and Baptiste producers Harry and Jack Williams.

As the father of the murdered Lara, Adrian Edmondson delivered a searing portrait of grief. But had he really been conducting an affair with another of Miri’s friends, Mandy (Christine Bottomley), at the time of Lara’s killing?

His wife suspected so and turned up at the supermarket where Miri was working for confirmation.

Miri, meanwhile, was wrestling with the knowledge that Mandy had told Lara that it was Miri who had been sleeping with her father. This had led Lara to confront Miri, resulting in her fatal plunge – and Miri’s murder conviction.

Back in the present, Miri was pressing on with her slow-burn almost-romance with the bashful Billy (Adeel Akhtar). They shared lunch on a bench and Miri remarked that sandwiches were far less common in prison than you might imagine.

It was a wistful and surreal line: funny yet bleak. And a joke that captured the essence of Back to Life – full of chuckles but not shying away from the darkness at its centre.

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