Forever Home review – Graham Norton’s corpse-in the-basement thriller absolutely stinks

‘What in the name of the Virgin Mother is that terrible honk?” bellows Moira (Denise Welch) as she staggers disgustedly around her daughter Carol’s kitchen. “The smell!” she continues, cheeks ballooning in horror as Carol (Amy Nuttall) – who is, you suspect, familiar with such theatrics – busies herself with the teabags. “Carol?! The smell.”

Moira – a vision of motherly forbearance in cerise elastane – is not the only one alarmed by the mysterious stench emanating from 7 Stable Row, the Edwardian domicile in which six-part thriller Forever Home does the bulk of its thrilling. Carol’s unblinking partner, Robert (Douglas Henshall, far better than he needs to be), wonders if the smell might be something to do with the drains. Robert’s son Kaden (Lewis Cope) suspects foxes. And Carol? Carol is as narked with the funk as the rest of them.

That said, she thinks it’s probably best not to mention the fact that it’s all down to the corpse that’s currently defrosting in the faulty freezer she has just discovered in the cellar. Not just yet, anyway. Wouldn’t want to put anyone off their garibaldis. Particularly as said stiff appears to be Robert’s first wife, a “cow” who had, according to an increasingly shifty Robert, buggered off with his brother 20 years ago. Determined to prove to herself that Robert – who is in the early stages of dementia – is innocent, Carol soon finds herself in an investigational pea-souper, a tangled web of murder and blah in which long-buried secrets emerge from yawn and etcetera.

All clear? Grand. And so, with nose pinched and buttocks clenched, we bash on.

Based on the bestselling novel by Graham Norton, Forever Home is the latest emission from Channel 5’s Indistinguishable Domestic Thriller Processing Complex™, the shadowy facility responsible for such mechanically separated tubes of bunkum as Number One Fan, For Her Sins, The Fortune and no-me-neither classic of the genre, The Game.

You know the deal: murder, betrayal, ex-soap actors in drab cardigans nursing visibly empty coffee mugs while standing alone in fitted kitchens from B&Q’s These Lies Are Tearing Your Marriage Apart Babes® range. Here, however, the custom blend of banality and absurdity is served with an unexpected accompaniment: humour. This is represented by lines such as “She doesn’t know her Van Goghs from her Van Dammes!” and a winking string motif that pops up whenever Forever Home wants us to know it’s safe to come out from behind the sofa.

So here is Robert’s daughter Sally (Jenny Walser), a gullible leisure centre receptionist engaged in a saucy subplot with adulterous spanner Patrick (James Baxter). “We can get married in Las Vegas!” she swoons during one of their clandestine bums’n’tums workouts in the leisure centre’s store room. “Grumph,” replies Patrick, his faithless bum cheeks clacking like castanets.

The soundtrack continues to tee-hee when an increasingly desperate Sally decides to befriend Patrick’s sweetly clueless wife, and refuses to let up even when, later, she starts secretly pawing through her underwear drawer.

When Carol finally shares her cadaver-based discovery with Moira, it’s party time at the giggle factory. You can’t tell the police, shrieks Moira. There’ll be trophy hunters. “This place will become like a grisly house of horrors! Robert … AKA Fred West!”

Does this lighthearted approach to unhilarious subjects (eg dismemberment and stalking) work? It does not. Does it at least offer the odd moment of blackly comic respite from what would otherwise be an unremittingly bleak catalogue of domestic traumas? Again, no.

Instead, we have a drama that crashes between tones and issues like a drunken soap, but without the earnestness or depth of characterisation that can make these things bearable. The only topic Forever Home considers a lol-free zone is Robert’s dementia. We know this because his scenes are accompanied by a sad piano rather than thigh-slapping and titters.

Nobody turns up to a weeknight Channel 5 thriller expecting prestige subtlety or searing psychological insight. But is it too much to ask for a script that doesn’t honk like a defrosting corpse? Suffice to say: don’t go into the cellar.