Shortly before her husband’s funeral, the undertaker told the eponymous main character in Mrs Wilson (BBC1, Tuesday) that, ‘We’re here to make this tragic time as straightforward as possible.’ By then, though, we already knew this remark was the kind that, in a school set book, would soon be underlined with the words ‘Dramatic irony!!’ written in the margin. That’s because in its quiet way — devoid of both globetrotting locations and international terrorism — Mrs Wilson is as tangled and morally ambiguous as The Little Drummer Girl.
The opening episode began in the far-off days of 1963: so far off, in fact, that Alison Wilson (Ruth Wilson) was first seen nipping home from her office typing pool to make lunch for her husband Alec. Then, as she was preparing it, he died of a heart attack. Presumably Alison understood that her future would now be very different from how she’d imagined it. What she hadn’t reckoned on was that so would her past. Later that evening, a woman showed up claiming to be Alec’s wife Gladys. Worse still, she was — although Alison needed several flashbacks to accept it.
The first took us to 1940, when Alison had been doing her typing for the wartime intelligence services. Her boss is played by Fiona Shaw, who saved herself some effort by faithfully reproducing her performance as the intelligence boss in Killing Eve: stern, inscrutable and seemingly in possession of some secret hilarity. More congenial was Major Wilson (Iain Glen), who appeared an impressive blend of the dashing and the dependable, what with looking great in uniform while smoking a pipe. Admittedly he was married to begin with — but over one of their many posh lunches, he flourishingly produced his divorce papers. Before long, Alison was so smitten that she insisted on having sex even when Churchill was on the radio.
Unfortunately, once we returned to 1963, it became clear that the divorce papers were forged, and that Alec’s mysterious absences over the years mightn’t have been for undercover intelligence work after all.
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