All you wanted was a kitchen extension. But instead of spending your days picking out marble countertops and shopping around for one of those fridges that dispense ice cubes and sparkling water, you’re mired in a planning permission dispute that has torn your quiet street apart. Your oddball neighbours keep ominously gesturing towards their flower beds, as if to suggest that’s where you might end up if you don’t back down with your building plans that might encroach on your shared wall. You’re being blackmailed by a builder who you vaguely recognise from Coronation Street. Oh, and your husband is definitely sleeping with your best mate, who conveniently happens to live next door.
Is this a particularly mundane version of hell? Nope, just the plot of The Feud, a six-part series starring Jill Halfpenny that aired on Channel 5 last month. Well, more accurately, it’s some of the plot. There’s also a storyline about one of the Derry Girls platonically catfishing Halfpenny’s character’s daughter in order to exact some tenuous revenge. Plus a strand featuring Neil’s dad from The Inbetweeners keeping tabs on everyone using long-distance binoculars. Oh, and Larry Lamb from Gavin & Stacey is somehow involved, too.
Feeling overwhelmed already? Welcome to the exhausting, but somehow exhilarating, world of the Channel 5 thriller, where everything is at once completely banal and totally bonkers. All you can do is surrender to the madness – preferably while pouring out a glass of red wine and sighing, like every single female protagonist labouring under the weight of a Dark Secret in this thriving televisual micro-genre.
Historically, Channel 5 has, let’s face it, not really been known for its dramatic output. You might accidentally tune in to a documentary about Charles and Diana’s wedding or a reality show about airport security – the emphasis was factual, not fictional. Yet over the past five years or so, the broadcaster has shifted its focus.
In 2020, it launched its adaptation of the cosy Yorkshire-set vet novels All Creatures Great and Small, which proved to be a hit. It has since snapped up solid detective series, such as a new adaptation of PD James’s Dalgleish novels, and even provided Paul Mescal with his first post-Normal People role (in The Deceived, co-written by Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee). And, most strikingly, it has doubled down on churning out unhinged domestic thrillers starring an array of recognisable British stars who’ll put in a good promo shift on The One Show.
These shows are the sort of thing that would once have been ITV’s stock in trade: solid, schlocky, packed with hammy cliffhangers every 15 minutes to coincide with the ad breaks. The Feud (brilliantly described in a one-star Telegraph review as “essentially Abigail’s Party Wall Agreement”) encapsulates the formula pretty well. A run-of-the-mill occurrence goes drastically wrong. Secrets from the past emerge at precisely the wrong time. Neighbours, family and close friends alike are all shifty as hell and not to be trusted. With Halfpenny, a stalwart of British soaps and former Strictly champion, we have a familiar face leading the cast. Rupert Penry-Jones, formerly of Spooks, plays her on-screen husband.
It’s the second time they’ve starred together in a C5 drama, having both previously appeared in 2021’s The Drowning, and this sense of déjà vu is another key tenet of the genre: Halfpenny herself has appeared in a whole crop of similar shows for the channel, from The Cuckoo (a creepy lodger inveigles herself into a family’s life) to The Holiday (a friends’ trip to Malta is marred by infidelity, aggro and, ultimately, death).
She’s not the only actor who keeps returning, either. Sally Lindsay, another former soap star, has played a woman scammed out of her life savings in not one but two offerings for the channel: 2019’s Cold Call (where said scam occurs over the phone) and last year’s Love Rat, in which her character falls for a handsome hotelier on a holiday to Cyprus then promptly bank transfers him £200,000. Jason Watkins is another C5 mainstay, cropping up in 2023’s The Catch and, more recently, The Game, where he plays a newly retired police officer facing off against Robson Green. Even Sheridan Smith, the first lady of ITV, has jumped ships to star in The Teacher (playing the titular teacher, in streaming platform My5’s most popular launch to date) and The Castaways.
The repertory feel, with the same actors cropping up again and again, has shades of Netflix’s Harlan Coben mystery adaptations, which also tend to recycle stars from series to series (for a case in point, you only need to glance at Richard Armitage’s IMDb page). It’s not the only similarity with the Coben-verse, either. The plot twists manage to be somehow entirely baffling yet utterly predictable. The guest stars tend to be picked from the elder statespeople of British telly (in Coben’s Missing You, we get a cameo from Joanna Lumley; in Channel 5’s The Inheritance, we’re treated to an appearance from Inspector Lewis himself, Kevin Whateley). The dialogue lands heavy with explication.
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Subtlety, it’s safe to say, is not their strongest suit. The opening scenes of Love Rat are shot so dingily, I had to check whether my TV had accidentally been switched to grayscale: no, it was merely a very on-the-nose way of hammering home just how depressing Lindsay’s character’s post-divorce life is, before she jets off to Cyprus to be romanced and defrauded. The opening credits for The Feud split the word “feud” in half, and then add a smattering of blood, just in case you are unfamiliar with the concept of feuds.
Despite all this – or maybe, in fact, because of it – there’s an undeniable can’t-stop-watching quality to every single one of these shows. They’re the epitome of so bad it’s good: tropey, soapy, undeniably silly TV that you can keep up with even if you’re ordering your weekly shop at the same time. I’m entirely unsurprised that these C5 potboilers seem to be enjoying wildly successful second lives on Netflix, where second-screen-friendly viewing (ie shows that can be watched with one eye on your phone) reigns supreme. Love Rat has been a fixture in the streamer’s UK top 10 for the past few weeks, while last October two of the broadcaster’s shows, The Inheritance and The Cuckoo, took up residence in that same list.
Their Netflix triumph is proof that we don’t always want or need our TV shows to be sensible, grounded and grappling with heavy hitting subjects. We humans are simple creatures: sometimes, all we require is something formulaic but effective, starring a likeable actor pushed into increasingly mad situations. Yes, The White Lotus is all well and good, but sometimes all you need is Danny Dyer playing a British ex-pat called Steve, dealing with some about to be unburied secrets while also facing bushfires in Australia (as he does in Channel 5’s Heat).
Switch-off escapism isn’t the only reason why these shows occupy an important place in our TV ecosystem, though. The British TV industry isn’t in the strongest of health; a handful of headline-making success stories belie the fact that UK broadcasters are struggling to keep up with the streamers and their seemingly endless budgets. Soaps are being cut back; continuing dramas such as Holby City and Doctors have been culled outright. There are fewer and fewer accessible training grounds for actors, writers, directors and other behind-the-camera workers and, without them, getting a foothold in the industry is becoming more difficult.
Against this backdrop, any push for original, British-made drama with mass appeal feels like something to celebrate, even if the reviews are a bit hit and miss. Later this year, Channel 5 is launching a Drama of the Week strand, showcasing six hour-long programmes in primetime slots; the aim is to create one-off dramas in the vein of the BBC’s Play for Today, and to provide opportunities for newcomers from working-class backgrounds at the same time. It sounds like these shows will be a bit more serious in tone than my beloved bonkers thrillers. But would the channel have had the confidence to launch an ambitious project like this one if it hadn’t already built up a chunky dramatic back catalogue?
So with that in mind, you’ll find me pouring out a glass of red wine and raising it to the Channel 5 drama factory. And then staring mournfully out of the nearest window, while pondering an as-yet-undetermined secret that’s about to rear its head.
