Jack on the Box

1.01 / Tue 31 BBC1
First things first, if you're tuning in expect something even half as delightfully delicious as Mistresses, whose time slot All The Small Things has taken, tune out right now. This is an altogether inferior affair. That's not to say it's not good, it just doesn't seem to know what it is. There's comedy (perhaps better described as light amusement actually) in the forms of broad-accented characters with wobbly guts but Big Hearts (they're a community, you see). There's drama; Esther's teenage son Kyle has Aspergers and is bullied by thuggish chavs from the school. But there's not really any balance.

The plot is particularly ropey too. Sarah Lancashire excels as Esther, a country kind of girl with no especially big ambitions; she just enjoys the company of her family, and her friends at the church choir around which the show is centred. Her husband Michael (Neil Pearson) is content too, until Layla (Sarah Alexander, who it seems is not choosy with her roles) turns up at choir practice. She's young and glamorous, and instantly Michael is besotted. However for apparently no reason at all he breaks it off with his wife, citing that he's bored of her rose-tinted prognosis of life, and embarks on an affair with Layla. Then he tells Esther about the affair and asks that she remain patient until, basically, he's got it out of his system. Yes, that is genuinely what happens.

Kyle, a huge Blink-182 fan, is played with a touching sincerity by the previously-awful Richard Fleeshman, but sometimes the soppyness is laid on too hard. There are some interesting characters; Esther, her daughter, and new-in-town jack-the-lad Jake. It just all feels slightly tired. The Chase, Gaynor Faye's short-lived BBC1 drama based around a vetinary practice, did the whole families-and-fallouts-in-the-country thing a lot better. Ultimately All The Small Things has potential, but I doubt, somehow, that it will ever reach it.