At 22, you move from Leeds to London for your first proper job, and get the keys to a flat with your uni boyfriend. But on day one, you break up, and are then stuck living together for the next six months as “friends” until you can wriggle out of your tenancy. We’ve all been there, right?
Well, maybe we haven’t but, watching Break Clause, it’s easy to feel as though you have. This six-part comedy-drama harks back to the peak sadcom era of the late 2010s, when pretty much every show on TV was being referred to as “the new Fleabag”, and tears were de rigueur. It will make you laugh, it might make you cry and, at the very least, it will make you think twice about moving in with anybody ever again.
Break Clause is the creation of Jess Bray, who has worked on Big Boys and We Might Regret This, and is directed by Alice Snedden, co-writer and star in Starstruck. Unlike that series, Break Clause isn’t a whimsical romcom, despite a very whimsical romcom opening in which Ben (Samuel Bottomley) chooses the exact moment that his girlfriend, Lil (Lara Ricote), is about to walk across the stage at graduation to tell her that he will move down to London with her after all (men, amirite?). Don’t let the soundtrack fool you, either; you may be singing along to Baby, Now That I’ve Found You by the Foundations and Sylvester’s disco bop You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), but it will be out of habit rather than unbridled joy.
It is not unrelentingly bleak, but Break Clause captures post-university malaise in a way that is almost uncomfortably true-to-life. While Lil has a job lined up with an architectural practice, Ben is an unemployed writer, and resorts to skip diving to save on groceries. He won’t do a medical trial for money – it’s “morally dodgy”, he says – although he quickly changes his mind when he finds out that it’s £800 for each study.
Much like the real world – where, post-graduation, friends’ circumstances can change seemingly magically and without warning and the word “broke” can lose all meaning – there is also a class element at play. Ben resents Lil – who, like Ricote, is Mexican-American – for coasting down to the capital with her “big fucking bank account”, while he has spent all summer working in an ice-cream van to be able to make the move. It’s a little heavy-handed at times, a little too north/south divide (Ben is a northerner, who grew up in Leeds and went to university there), but it makes its point on privilege.
Not least when Ben admits to their Thanksgiving dinner guests that the turkey they are eating was sourced from a bin. Luckily, it is also very funny, with a weird bent that updates the sadcom premise for our current golden age of deadpan weirdness (think: Saturday Night Live UK). Speaking of SNL, there is much crossover here: Jack Shep plays Lil and Ben’s apparently guileless mate Liam (part of a winning crew that also includes Assa Kanouté and Tamika Bennett), while Hammed Animashaun plays a terrible estate agent who doesn’t even own a pen that works.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
