White House Farm
Meat The Family
Rating: 
That wallpaper. Dingy and ancient, with an overpowering pattern, it evoked the Eighties as no amount of pop songs and classic cars could ever do.
Young people usually imagine the Thatcher decade as an era of straight lines, dramatic red-and-grey colour schemes and shoulders like helicopter landing pads.
White House Farm kept a sombre, respectful pace, never going for cheap sensation
But most were living with home furnishings accumulated throughout a century, an oppressive collection of stuff that had ‘still got a few years in it’ — decor that wouldn’t die. Zombie furniture.
White House Farm (ITV) captured that atmosphere with a gloomy intensity. The rural Essex home of Nevill and June Bamber was filled with battered wooden dressers and chairs, chipped china, fading curtains and worn rugs.
Dingy and ancient, with an overpowering pattern, the wallpaper evoked the Eighties perfectly like pop songs and classic cars
Mark Addy stars as the browbeaten junior of Stephen Graham. The pair make a surprisingly mismatched team
Uncanny: Actor Freddie Fox, 30, bares a very striking resemblance to mass murderer Jeremy Bamber in a new picture from upcoming drama White House Farm
Most overwhelming of all was that Sixties wallpaper, greasy with age, like a red wine migraine.
Sentimentality oozed from the ornaments. June, aged 61 at her death in 1985, had a pair of plaster statuettes that probably dated from her own childhood: cherubic toddlers, kneeling with their heads bowed in obedient prayer. Like everything else that was once cheerful in the house, age had made them sinister.
John, Dawn, Sam and Max feature heavily in Meat The Family
Cressida Bonas gave a convincing portrayal of Nevill and June’s mentally shattered daughter, Sheila. She cowered in the bathroom, stuttering her prayers, or stared blankly through a fog induced by the medication that her parents insisted she take. Her twin sons, six-year-old Daniel and Nicholas, lived with their father.
But it was Freddie Fox who dominated the story, as the narcissistic younger brother Jeremy Bamber, who called the police on the night of August 7, claiming he feared Sheila was holding her parents and children at gunpoint in the farmhouse. When firearms officers broke down the door, they found all five dead inside.
The series focuses on families who are invited to turn their back gardens into farmyards, rearing livestock. They then decide if they want to eat their livestock (pictured, the Branson family)
This true-life drama kept a sombre, respectful pace, never going for cheap sensation. The first episode began and ended in silence, the camera watching across the flat landscape around the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy.
Stephen Graham, as the abrasive detective who wants the killings brushed over as a murder-suicide, and Mark Addy as his browbeaten junior — convinced that Sheila could not have killed herself after shooting her family — made a believably mismatched team. When news broke of the tragedy, it polarised the country: many people were incapable of believing any woman could do such a terrible thing, while others did not hesitate to condemn her.
John and Dawn are photographed feeding pigs in the series which shows the divide between veggies and omnivores today
The real test for this six-part drama will be how it conveys that national divide.
The divide between veggies and omnivores is rapidly spreading across Britain too.
Five years ago, Meat The Family (C4) would have seemed a crackpot programme: now, it reflects the discussion going on in millions of homes.
Two families were invited to turn their back gardens into farmyards, rearing livestock…then deciding if they wanted to eat it. Cynthia and Sam’s three daughters fell in love with their broiler chickens — Jennifer, Clucky and Bailey. The girls taught them to do tricks, and invited the neighbours round to see how the birds had learned to tackle assault courses.
It seemed certain the chickens were destined to lead pampered lives before, eventually, nature took its course and they became feather dusters.
No such luck. The last we saw of Jennifer, Clucky and Bailey was in a roasting tray, getting stuffed and basted. There were tears but there was also gravy.
There’s a lesson here: being cute is one thing, being tasty is quite another.