As the whole series is on iPlayer, and In order to discuss the concluding episodes properly, there are major spoilers in this review. 

The rift between Claire and her family, suspicious of her relationships with the other ‘listeners’, threatens to destroy her life.

It’s hard to argue that the opening episodes of The Listeners didn’t set up an interesting narrative conundrum. If an individual perceives reality differently from the norm, does it necessarily mean that they are psychotic? Must it always be viewed as the root of cult and conspiracism? If you abandon social norms, does it lay the foundations for grooming and abuse?

Actually, I’m not convinced that writer Jordan Tannahill is asking that last question – or if he is, the drama, perhaps unwittingly, leads us to some highly questionable conclusions. Disturbingly, the impression the viewer is left with at the end of the series, is that had their divergent behaviour been accepted by their families, then love would have been able to blossom between Claire – an English teacher – and one of her school-aged students.

It’s convincingly rendered. Rebecca Hall as Claire and Ollie West as the unhappy teenager, Kyle, play it with utter sincerity, but it’s a queasy watch. I kept imagining whether this would have even gone to air had the genders been reversed and the teacher had been a forty year old man and the pupil a seventeen year old girl. The drama is manipulated so it’s the boy who tells Claire that he loves her, a sentiment the teacher accepts with big doughy eyes. Dramatically, this is supposed to exonerate Hall’s character, but again, just flip the genders.

Yes, the characters are dramatically ‘punished’ (in a less than convincing way, redolent of the 110m shark hurdle) but we are left to conclude that the feeling between them was pure, and that it was only stultifying conformity that was to blame. This is a charter that has been exploited by groomers from time immemorial.

It’s a shame that Tannahill took it down this route, because there is a decent story to be told about the borderline between the paranormal and the abnormal, and how perceptual divergence relates to the very basics of how we all live our lives and how societies function. It’s grown up stuff, but the meat gets lost under some decidedly ropey characterisation.

The biggest problem is the character of Claire at the centre of the whole series. She is extremely hard to like. Tannahill recruits ‘bluffers guide’ feminist arguments to ‘prove’ that her choice to put her belief in the ‘hum’ above the needs of her family is tantamount to a human right, but in the end her actions are unforgivably selfish. Tannahill had so boxed me in by his polemic that I was afraid to express my disdain for Claire, for fear of complying with gammon-faced sexism, until my wife – with 35 years of safeguarding experience – muttered at the end of episode 3: ‘I hope she gets run over in the next bit.’

Rebecca Hall, however, deserves a BAFTA, if only for exclaiming passionately, ‘Everything comes from inside the hum!’ as if it wasn’t the most ridiculous line ever to be uttered in a BBC drama.

Verdict: The Listeners was a largely compelling watch (despite an over-extended ending) but promising material buckled under the weight of the writer’s manipulative polemic. In the end it wasn’t challenging, it was just unpleasant. 4/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com