I’ve become hooked on a BBC comedy starring Dawn French and Alfred Molina, although I don’t really see it as a comedy at all.
When I watched the first episode of Roger and Val Have Just Got In I thought it was about nothing more than an unremarkable couple getting in from work and talking about their day, while they geared up to do mundane household tasks like hanging curtains. But gradually, an altogether more poignant theme emerged which rapidly tore at my heart-strings. The subtle clues were there (the little painted chair at the end of Episode One) but I missed them at the start. It was only when Val picks up a photograph of her younger self holding a tiny baby that I realised the tragedy behind the comedy. It emerges that Roger and Val’s baby son died at 5 weeks and they remain childless every since.
Beth Kilcoyne, co-writer of the series with her sister Emma, explains that their aim was to “set Roger and Val Stevenson’s life in the context of tragedy and… therefore deploy the concept of seeing them intimately at home to answer that ultimate question: why go on?”
“Losing a child is the worst thing in the world that can happen to a person. It hasn’t happened to me and we would have had no moral authority to write about it had it not been for a friend of ours who had recently lost her own much-loved baby girl…. I told our friend that it had been suggested, and I will never forget her reply: “I absolutely dare you to write this series to show that where there is love, there is hope.” That’s when I said yes, and throughout the writing process our brave friend collaborated with Emma and me; there is no emotion around the subject of loss that didn’t come from her.”
Watching Roger and Val is a bittersweet experience. I caught the repeat last night and felt overwhelmed with emotion when Val, says of her baby “inside I still feel like his mummy”. This was in response to Roger’s assertion that he was a Dad for 5 weeks, but he is no one’s dad anymore. Val says quietly “his name is Stephen”.
Powerful and heart-wrenching stuff but utterly believable, and in my mind made all the more so because of the very ordinariness of their lives. The cracks are papered over, the heart-wounds patched up, but ultimately the pain lies exposed underneath and never goes away.
Diary of a Miracle 
