The state of affairs
When did infidelity become acceptable on screen?
BBC
- Caroline Frost
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Josh loves two women. If you need to know any more than that, you can watch the final episode of the first series of Cheaters, where he struggles with his embarrassment of riches and admits to his lover about his longtime girlfriend: “She is great, and she deserves better. But I think you make me better.”
The pint-sized BBC1 drama, which returns this week, certainly does what it says on the tin. Strangers Josh and Fola, played by Joshua McGuire and Susan Wokoma, meet in a Finnish airport where their flight is delayed. They get drunk and sleep together, then return home to discover they are brand new neighbours.
Joshua McGuire and Susan Wokoma in BBC show Cheaters. Natalie Seery/BBC Studios/Clerkenwell Films
Cheaters calls itself a “messy, sexy comedy”. Messy? Yes. Sexy? No doubt, for those two. Comedy? Depends on who you ask. For their cuckolded partners, this is surely more Doctor Foster than Doctor in the House.
Disney bonkbuster Rivals, meanwhile, has all sorts of extramarital goings-on, but the pairing we’re invited to invest in is millionaire Freddie Jones and writer Lizzie Vereker, both likeable, both lonely, both married to others. Danny Dyer, who plays Freddie, told RT: “We’re hoping the audience will root for us to have an affair, which sounds awful.”
Breaking the bonds of marriage, betrothal or just “expectation” has always been fertile fodder for storytellers since long before Jane Austen’s bounders Wickham and Willoughby, or Madame Bovary’s adultery. I always used to enjoy the British tradition of treating such subject matter in a suppressed way – the only rattling between Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter emanated from their teacups, while everybody’s feet remained on the floor in the 1970s sitcom Butterflies. Ria and her admirer Leonard stole only lunches, not kisses, through four flawless series.
Ria Parkinson (Wendy Craig) and Ben Parkinson (Geoffrey Palmer) in Butterflies. UKTV
The 1980s brought with them the faithless foot raised from the bedroom floor. When Coronation Street siren Deirdre Barlow strayed with factory-owning lothario Mike Baldwin, the nation reached for its pearls with questions raised in the House. When Deirdre eventually chose to stay with her husband Ken, Manchester United interrupted a League Cup semi-final match against Arsenal to write “Ken 1 Mike 0” on the scoreboard, an announcement received with rapturous cheers. The marital apple cart may have wobbled, but ultimately it did not fall down.
The marriage story is no longer automatically the love story
Compare with today’s headlines, boasting, “I’ve been having an affair for 15 years, and I’m so empowered.” What happened? For reasons ranging from the shrunken influence of religion and its threat of eternal damnation through to the rise of women’s rights and their options beyond the patriarchy, the marriage story is no longer automatically the love story. For the definitive exploration of infidelity and how it changes everyone involved, I recommend HBO’s The Affair. Here, as in so many modern dramas, marriage serves as the status quo for resentment, defiance and escape. The show is too sophisticated to follow today’s tropes that betrayal is the symptom, not the cause, although other writers still often hedge their bets.
In Cheaters, Fola’s husband hasn’t embraced her in a year; in Rivals, Freddie’s wife commits the heinous crime of wearing too-new clothes to a hunt. The message in both: these cuckolds were asking for it.
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Finally, spare a thought for pop star Lee Ryan who, in 2014, became embroiled in a love triangle on Celebrity Big Brother, and found himself the subject of death threats from the braying public. A year later, Love Island was rebooted for TV, where the whole premise of romantic betrayal wasn’t just accepted but required. Lee once told me sadly, “I was just ahead of my time.”
Authors
Caroline Frost
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