Sun-kissed Malta served as the idyllic setting for Channel 5’s new thriller The Holiday. Even the bright sunshine couldn’t hide the reality that this was a depressing, box-ticking mystery. The real question as the undercooked psychological escapade got underway was whether there was a narrative behind the toe-curling language.
As middle-aged marrieds Kate and Sean, Jill Halfpenny, a British soap veteran who has been on Coronation Street and EastEnders, and Killing Eve’s Owen McDonnell had little chemistry.
They were planning a holiday in a fancy villa with some of Kate’s old university mates. Even so, there was difficulty in paradise from the start.
While professing to be texting his football WhatsApp group, Sean was secretly exchanging messages with someone dubbed “CoralGirl.” Which was worse: his betrayal of Kate or the ridiculous excuse he’d concocted? Kate’s pals couldn’t stop fawning uncontrollably over her hairy other half when they arrived at the property. Kate, on the other hand, looked awful the entire time.
She was also unconcerned about her teenage daughter Lucy (Lara McDonnell) hanging around with Jenny’s bad-boy son Jake (Shaun O’Callaghan Wade), who was a friend of Jenny’s.
Halfpenny did her best as a woman on the point of exhaustion. McDonnell, who was so good as Eve’s hapless husband in Killing Eve, seemed lost.
The play was bookended by a hazy flash-forward to a blaze that had supposedly destroyed the vacation mansion, written by Michael Crompton of Silent Witness. But I couldn’t care less about what happened to these clumsily conceived people.
This trip had been a nightmare that couldn’t come to an end fast enough.