Last Tango in Halifax review

Sally Wainwright's drama about family and relationships is so good it makes you think about your own.

Last Tango in Halifax, BBC1, review

Last Tango in Halifax is so good and so widely praised, you'd think it would have some imitators by now. But as the third series opened tonight on BBC One, there's still nothing else quite like Sally Wainwright's clever, cosy family drama on television.

Sally Wainwright interview

Writer Sally Wainwright chats about creating the series, inspired by her mother rekindling a relationship and subsequently marrying her teenage sweetheart Alec, and hints at what we can expect in Series 3.

Interview: Sally Wainwright

After receiving praise from viewers and critics alike, Sally Wainwright's Last Tango in Halifax returns to BBC One on Sunday. The third series catches up with newly married Alan and Celia as Alan's daughter Gillian heads out on a date with a mystery man and Celia's daughter Caroline makes big plans with partner Kate. We were lucky enough to grab some time with Sally to discuss the new series as well as her massive success of Happy Valley and ITV's Scott & Bailey.

Radio Times review

The scope widened in series two of the Bafta-winning romantic drama, with as much screen time devoted to family strife as to pensionable lovers Alan and Celia's late-blooming courtship. Not that this is in any way a problem - in fact we now care just as much for the younger adults as we do for the recently reunited sweethearts. The key is the wit and wisdom that runs through Sally Wainwright's scripts, all subtly performed by such stars as Sarah Lancashire and the peerless Nicola Walker, the latter of whom was a picture of anguish for most of the run.

Though Alan and Celia are the twin heartbeats of Last Tango, in many ways this series has been about the flourishing of another relationship, the one between their daughters Caroline and Gillian.

Last week's episode was pivotal for the women when, in vino veritas, spiky, defensive Gillian (Nicola Walker) revealed a very dark episode from her past to an unwitting Caroline (Sarah Lancashire). Tonight, in the last instalment of the series, the pair emerge from a foggy alcoholic night to take stock.

But don't run away with the idea that it's all grim. There is a wedding to organise as Alan and Celia (Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi) renew their vows on a snowy Christmas Eve. It's a lovely occasion and writer Sally Wainwright, with her gift for putting her finger exactly on a drama's emotional pulse, brings us an occasion to cherish.

Too many people give too much away in Sally Wainwright's masterly drama, as Last Tango in Halifax takes some very dark turns. Emotional scabs that have never healed are ripped away by unwitting hands and the families at the heart of the drama pulse with the pain of open wounds. Celia (Anne Reid) inadvertently, though very thoughtlessly (and typically, as Reid told RT recently, because Celia is not a very nice woman), throws light on a bleak corner in the grim farm on the hill that illuminates a past sadness.

Soon relationships start to sunder under the pressure of exposed secrets and long-buried lies. Even that absolutely gorgeous house in Harrogate (oh, that kitchen! Those gardens!) is quietly starting to foment when it appears that lovers Caroline and Kate (Sarah Lancashire and Nina Sosanya) might want very different things, and a moment of tenderness sparks a crisis.

Poor Alan and Celia. Getting married secretly without telling their families is meant to be "just a bit of fun," say the hapless, happy couple. But their rash romanticism falls on stony ground as chippy, glum Gillian sees it as a betrayal. Oh, Gillian. It's tempting to yell at her, "Why don't you just cheer up, love?" but she has much to be anguished about. She thinks her lovely dad's common sense-filled head has been corrupted by his new association with sinfully bourgeois Harrogate, and her son delivers an emotional torpedo that threatens to blow up that gloomy family farmhouse on the moors.

It's another carefully calibrated episode of Sally Wainwright's smashing drama, as her characters push the frontiers of their lives into new and uncharted territories. For Alan and Celia (Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid), Gillian and Caroline (Nicola Walker and Sarah Lancashire) so much is about to change....

It's been a thinnish week for drama but Last Tango in Halifax, Sally Wainwright's almost sugar-free romance about two pensioners - former lovestruck teenagers reunited by Facebook after 60 years - was back for a second series having won the nation's affection and a Bafta last time out.

We found the pair almost as we left them, with the excellent Derek Jacobi as Alan, recovering from a heart attack brought on by their hasty quarrel about the desirability of lesbianism in Harrogate and perhaps one too many respiratory struggles with glottal northernisms (the downfall of many a thespian). Much has been made of this septuagenarian double act, and Jacobi and Anne Reid, a natural as Celia, shone even when they were just gazing over t'moors and talking about dead people.

It would be a gentler story, though, without the complications whipped up by their clashing daughters - Gillian (Nicola Walker), a widowed single mum and grubby farmer with an impulsive sex drive, and freshly outed Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), snooty head teacher of a school that sings Jerusalem every morning - each conscious, amid declarations of love and alarm bells at the realisation that old people have minds of their own, of festering parental disapproval that recent events could only aggravate.

With Caroline's dalliance with a junior female colleague out in the open, it was Gillian's turn to stir the pot with revelations of a drunken shag with Caroline's multi-philandering husband John (a wonderfully furtive Tony Gardner). I couldn't say whether this was more transgressive than Gillian's earlier eye-opener - seeing her carrying on (Yorkshire for sexual intercourse) with a lad young enough to be her son from the local filling station - but it had Derek Jacobi shaking his head. "You pillock," he said, a word that wasn't quite equal to his disappointment (he was thinking of the shame she had brought upon the house as a pregnant 15-year-old), but served to draw a line under the affair before he had another heart attack. In the end we left the lovebirds understandably sloping off to the register office for a deserved quiet wedding. But will they get it? Tune in Tuesday.

Review - Last Tango in Halifax, series two

Sally Wainwright's story of septuagenarian love continues with quietly smouldering passion.