Warning: if you haven’t seen it yet, the first episode of the much-anticipated Patrick Melrose (Sky Atlantic, Sunday) contains scenes of drug-taking. Further warning: it contains an awful lot of them.
The series is adapted from the five justly celebrated autobiographical novels by Edward St Aubyn, which trace the long-term effects on Patrick of an upper-class childhood in which his psychotic father intersperses horrifying emotional cruelty with regular bouts of rape. By his early twenties, Patrick is a full-blown drug addict, and even when he marries and settles down, what he settles down to is mostly depression and alcoholism.
All of which might make the books sound punishingly grim. In fact, they’re a hugely, if sometimes uncomfortably, entertaining read, where pain and comedy are not so much combined as entirely fused — and where St Aubyn’s narrative voice somehow manages to be both utterly heartfelt and slightly heartless. So how on earth would that level of tonal complexity transfer to TV?
The answer, it turns out, is rather well.
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