After a highly successful and well received first series, last week saw the return of the BBC One work-based drama Ordinary Lies.  Written and created by Danny Brocklehurst, the second series this time around is set in Wales with a new workplace and whole new cast.

Having no burning desire to write this review best signifies to you my feelings towards this first episode.  It was watchable but it was not outstanding.  It was a good standard drama but it did feel a bit like I had seen it all before somewhere.   It lacked the shock and punch of the Jason Manford first episode of the first series, the one where his character blamed his bad time keeping at work on his wife just dying(that being the BIG LIE).

This opening episode focused on the life of Joe Brierley(Con O’Neil), a perpetual joker and head of sales at a sports sales company.  After coming home early from work one day due to him falling over and banging his head via some high jinks with a co-worker, he is shocked to find that his wife Belle(Jill Halfpenny) has not gone to work and that she has also locked the front door.  This leads him to suspect she is having an affair and thus enter into a serious state paranoia about it.

Joe decides to have CCTV installed in his home in an attempt to catch his wife ‘at it’ with this other man.  Soon it becomes an obsession for him and completely takes over his life. The sales figures are down at work because his mind is elsewhere, constantly thinking about this affair that he thinks Belle is having.  She has form he thinks because months prior to this he had found some flirty texts on her phone from some hunky male doctor.

Over the course of him spying on the family home he discovers things that he wishes he had not.   Firstly, he sees his sixteen year old son smoking weed and getting overly friendly on the sofa with the neighbour’s thirteen year old girl from across the street.  Then, he discovers that indeed his wife is up to something but it is not an affair as he and us were led to believe.  This was the predictable bit of the narrative because it was all too obvious for her to be committing adultery.  Instead, it leads him to follow his wife and to discover that she is partaking in some local vigilantism against pedophiles.  The motivation from Belle coming from the backstory of their daughter once having been abused by a man who escaped going to jail.

With Joe’s obsession with CCTV and spying on his family, then undoubtedly Danny Brocklehurst wanted to look at the issues surrounding privacy and surveillance in society today.  The ethics of privacy were dealt with and an example of this was when Joe in a group therapy session stated,

”does anyone really know anyone?  Have I got a right to know everything, have I? Am I God, am I the all seeing eye or have I just found a new addiction….my family”?

I take it from this dialogue from Joe as well as the way the narrative concluded, that Brocklehurst is rather critical of the increased surveillance and Big Brother society that we currently now find ourselves in.  It is a reasonably interesting topic to examine in a drama although nothing new was added to the debate here.

Away from the Joe and Belle storyline, we saw glimpses of a very welcome forthcoming new one concerning the taboo subject mental health.  It involved randy recent divorcee Ally(Jennifer Nicholas), getting jiggy with handsome hunk Ash(Luke Bailey), up some back alley late at night.  As the episode progressed it became very apparent in their exchanges(VERBAL) that Ash had a mental health condition.  Whilst standing on a metal barrier overlooking a great drop beneath them both, Ash said to Ally,

”imagine the internal voice shouting jump, jump, jump, that’s how it feels to be me”.

In an age sadly where there is still a stigma associated with mental health illness, then the more we see of them featured in prime time fictional dramas such as this the better,i.e. greater awareness and understanding.   It is also positive that the writer has chosen Ash as the character to suffer from mental health difficulties.  Being the good looking one that all the girls fancy, then it challenges a certain stereotype that exists out there about what people with mental health conditions look like.  For instance, mental health does not discriminate upon who it effects, anybody can suffer from its debilitating impact.

Overall,  it was an OK return for Ordinary Lies, but nothing more. 3/5.