Truelove — timely Channel 4 drama puts assisted dying in the spotlight

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In December, the broadcaster Esther Rantzen made headlines by calling for a reform to the UK’s punitive assisted dying laws. Now, Channel 4’s new drama, Truelove, ensures that this difficult but necessary debate continues into 2024. A timely, tender six-part series, it follows a group of septuagenarians who vow to help each other make “an elegant exit” in their own time, on their own terms (and outside the law) after a friend succumbs to cancer. 

At the wake, which doubles as a reunion for the former schoolmates, reminiscences of a distant past inevitably give way to talk of the short future ahead. Drunk on pints and nostalgia, they draw up a plan to ensure each will avoid a painful, protracted end. But what is initially gallows humour becomes a real ethical dilemma for army veteran Ken (Clarke Peters) and ex-cop Philippa (Lindsay Duncan) when one of the gang reaches out to them months later invoking the pact. 

While the characters wrestle with the ethics, the series is careful not to reduce a complex subject into a parable that condemns or condones. Instead it sensitively confronts us with the desperation faced by those ailing without hope, and the awful burden placed on loved ones reduced to helpless bystanders or made perpetrators of a criminal act of compassion. 

Conflicts of conscience soon collide with matters of the heart, as cool, ageless Phil and gentle soul Ken find themselves rekindling a love that has remained aglow through the decades. Where Phil’s husband is intent on relocating them to “death’s waiting room” (a bungalow), Ken offers her a way back to her youth — or at least a glimpse of the life that they might have shared together had things played out differently. Awakened desire intermingles with aching regret.  

Duncan and Peters excel as the leads in a series that gives older lives a prominence and profundity too rarely seen on screen. What we already have lots of are police procedurals and cat-and-mouse thrillers, elements of which appear here in a pedestrian subplot involving an obsessive young cop digging into cases that might’ve been better left alone. An affecting human drama at its core, Truelove really doesn’t need to flirt with other genres. 

★★★☆☆

First episode streaming now on Channel 4. Next episode on January 4 at 9pm. New episodes weekly on Wednesdays and Thursdays.