The Gathering, review: pulsating drama will give parents of teenagers the fear
The Gathering is that rarest of things: a good drama on Channel 4. How often do you see one of those? It is about teenage girls doing all the things that you hope your own daughter isn’t doing: bunking off school, taking drugs, sending sexy selfies from the school toilets. So far, so Channel 4.
But it is also about parents doing all the things that are guaranteed to mess up their kids. On the one hand there is widower Paul (Warren Brown), who loves his children but doesn’t set the best example. Then there is Natalie (Boiling Point’s Vinette Robinson), an obnoxiously pushy mother who will stop at nothing to see her child succeed.
Paul and Natalie are, respectively, parents to Kelly (newcomer Eva Morgan) and Jess (Sadie Soverall), members of an elite gymnastics club in Liverpool and competing for places on Team GB. The series opens with a beach rave which cuts to a girl being pushed underwater, and then to a news report of her being pulled from the estuary in critical condition. This girl, we quickly surmise, is either Kelly or Jess. The whodunit then goes back to a month before the gathering, showing how the girls’ friendship turned toxic and led to this potential murder.
The drama, with a screenplay by novelist Helen Walsh, delves into social class. Jess is the private school girl with a privileged upbringing, brought up by a mother who has instilled a sense of entitlement. She has the space to practise gymnastics tumbling in her generously-sized back garden. Kelly lives in a council house with a mastiff, and is late for training because her dad doesn’t have a car. Natalie refuses to give the working-class girl a lift home: “I will not be a taxi service for kids whose parents can’t get their s--- together.”
Jess is the one getting into drugs and sex (no surprise for anyone who has been to private school), and watching this as a parent will make you want to ban smartphones from your teenager’s life. Yet the more mature Kelly is the one whose story you watch with a sense of impending heartbreak because you know that a girl from her background has the odds stacked against her, however hard she tries.
It’s not all gloomy. Kelly and her friends, notably Sonny Walker as Adam, are freerunners, and those scenes capture the heady joy of being young and unhindered by rules. The mostly local cast give naturalistic performances in authentic Scouse accents, led by Morgan, who graduated from drama school only a year ago but is a real find.
The Gathering begins on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight, and is available now as a boxset on Channel 4 online
