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I have – and I know it's what you all expected – a new measure of gender equality. We will know that parity has been reached in all areas, when there are as many bigamous women as there are men. This means that all the inequalities have been corrected. After all, you can only manage multiple secret families if both partners are equally responsible for child care, income, emotional work and other household chores. Let's make #bigamyforall our next Twitter campaign.
Those were the thoughts that left me in the spirit while the credits of the first part of Mrs. Wilson (BBC One), a drama based on the story of the grandmother of star Ruth Wilson, Alison , and her husband (Ruth's grandfather) Alec (played by Iain Glen). It turned out that it was not just Alison's husband, but the supposed spouse of at least two other women at the end of the first episode.
We learn that he and Alison met when she began working as a secretary at MI6 during the Second World War. He was older, an army major, revered in the department for his mastery of Arabic and his career as a spy writer, and is married. But, although he is Catholic, he was divorcing. We see his relationship mature with Alison and, once he has got his nisi decree, that she looks with rapture before putting it back in his pocket, they get married, have two sons and live together in the connubial happiness for 20 years Alec suddenly died of a heart attack. Alison conscientiously calls her husband's manager (Coleman, played by Fiona Shaw), the priest and the doctor, in that order. We are not yet in the 1960s and Stoicism is still on the agenda.
Among the knocking at Alison's door by neighbors carrying post-mortem pans and condolences, one is attributed to an unknown person. She's called Gladys. She picked up her husband's body from her owner, Alison, and brought it home to Southsea for burial. Alison makes noises of polite disbelief, closes the door and walks over to Coleman to see if she has copies of any of the vital documents that she can not find after browsing the collection under the bed. Coleman does not do it any more than the public archives office. Until then, the moral of the story is this: always check the nisi decree for signs of forgery, when it is handed to you by a man who has spent years in the secret service.
The common life of Alison and Alec escapes in a flashback, taking on more and more sinister shades as the scenario gets more complicated. He was certainly an intelligence officer, but how many undercover operations that had taken him away from home for months were for the king and for the country and how much for Alec and the unintentional Gladys? His arrest for wearing uniforms under false pretenses was it a cover story allowing him to infiltrate subversive groups in jail as part of another MI6 mission, as he l? had told Alison, or was it exactly what it seemed?
It's a beautiful story – we may know what it is, but how and why pulls us forward – but it's also a slow and melancholy meditation on how much and how little we we can know each other; about the pitfalls that love and trust hold us and how far you can go if you simply decide that the normal rules do not apply to you.
Gladys and Alison conclude a stoically civilized arrangement about burial to protect Alison's two sons – Gladys's own is older, informed of his father's double life and a model of grace under pressure – but then, alone at the corner of the grave, Alison is approached. by an unknown man explaining that he was Alec 's best friend for India and apologized for confusing it with Alec' s wife, Dorothy.
Oh. And indeed, ah. A polar and a howmanyhedunnitwith, then. Perhaps that explains Keeley Hawes' fleeting appearances – in the loo restaurant, when Alec and Alison meet up, then again at his funeral? Given his recent succession of protagonists, it may be that this is a new law of the universe that Hawes holds the key to all television mysteries, so I look forward to it and I can only wish that there is enough stoicism to go around.
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