Follow TV Tropes

Following

Series / The Lakes

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_lakes.jpg

The Lakes was a BBC television Sunday Evening Drama Series broadcast in Great Britain from 1997, created and written by Jimmy McGovern. It ran for two series and fourteen hour-long episodes. The series brought writer Jimmy McGovern and actor John Simm to public notice, a long time before his tenure on Doctor Who. This show's realistic characters and their painfully honest but flawed decisions hit audiences hard. Simm played Danny Kavanagh, a twenty-something trapped in a life of compulsive gambling, theft, and being on the dole in Liverpool. On a whim he heads north to the Lake District. He expects to find countryside quiet where he might contemplate his life and explore his hidden poetical leanings. However, he is soon embroiled in a rural community with a lot of dark secrets and hidden skeletons to conceal.He discovers a web of lies, temptations, human failings and tragedy beset every household. Danny's links to the Lakes becomes an exercise in torment when he is suspected after the accidental deaths of three schoolgirls. A whole lot of subplots involve affairs, some adulterous, others complicated by religion.

The core of both series is the relationship between Danny Kavanagh (John Simm) and Lucy Archer (Kaye Wragg). In Series One, Danny is a compulsive gambler and philanderer, who escapes from the dole queues in Liverpool to live in the Lake District. After he meets and marries local girl Emma Quinlan, they move back to Liverpool. Emma finally returns home because of Danny's gambling. He follows her, gets a job looking after a rowing boat concession, and starts to patch up his relationship with Emma, who now has a daughter.

Danny rejects unsubtle advances from the attention-seeking Lucy Archer, who determines to gain revenge. When three schoolgirls are drowned in a boating accident while Danny is on the phone to the bookies, Lucy lies to implicate him. Danny is unwilling to tell the truth, as he has promised to stop gambling, and the community is looking for someone to blame. Lucy is exposed as a liar in the subsequent inquest, when phone call records provide Danny with an alibi.

In Series Two, the unpopular and hated Lucy is raped by three locals. Only Danny, enduring the claustrophobic hostility and seething tensions of the Quinlan family home, can testify as a witness, putting him at odds with the village, his wife and her family.

This TV series has examples of these tropes:

  • Adults Are Useless: Especially prevalent in the first series: four young girls bunk off school, three of them take a boat out onto a lake and drown as a result, and all of this only happens thanks to various adults not paying enough attention.
  • Asshole Victim:
    • Lucy, a girl who is despised for her bad attitude and uncaring past behaviour by the whole community, and thus receives little sympathy when she is gang-raped. Others are not that far behind.
    • Simone, who could be described as a higher-functioning version of Lucy: she despises and belittles her husband, has affairs to humiliate him, and has even alienated her own family - her sister Beverley loathes her for her behaviour.
  • Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Both Danny and Lucy make the case for defending them very hard work in their respective criminal investigations. In Danny's case, he doesn't want his alibi (that he was on the phone placing a bet on a horse race) to become public knowledge in case it drives his wife away. In Lucy's case, it actually starts as a subversion when she attempts to follow proper procedure regarding the aftermath of the rape (even to the point of making sure not to shower until she sees the police to report it and also bringing the underwear she was wearing with her) and it's only when practically everyone has refused to take her claim seriously that her Jerkass attitude comes back to haunt her, with full force.
  • Black Bra and Panties: Ruth's taunting display to her paralysed husband "Chef", as she gets dressed for a night of adultery with another man, telling him in great detail what she intends to do and why.
  • Blackmail: In series 2, Chef uses the fact that Alfie is sleeping with his wife (as well as Alfie's fear of Chef in general) in order to get him to seduce Mrs Archer in order to humiliate her. It doesn't exactly work out as planned.
  • Bratty Teenage Daughter: Lucy Archer. She's a spoilt brat from a very affluent family and her personality is neither sympathetic nor loving. While nobody can help what they're born into, the fact she flaunts her affluence in a town where the majority are hard-up or actually struggling can only cause resentment. The fact many of those people are dependent on her parents for employment (at the local hotel) precludes retaliation.
  • Campbell Country: The small-town claustrophobia of the Cumbrian rural community, a long way away from the nearest town of any size and an even longer distance to the nearest city - which is technically in a different country.
  • Close-Knit Community: An unusual example in that while the actual community as a whole doesn't seem to be that close, both the adults and the young adults have formed close-knit communities of their own with little overlap between them. The series serves as a deconstruction of both.
  • Death of a Child: The first series centres around the aftermath of the accidental drowning of three schoolgirls.
  • Driven to Suicide: The first series ends with Danny rowing a boat out onto the lake, assuming he's lost everything after his alibi came out, and flipping a coin. The second series begins with him attempting to drown himself as a result of the coin-flip before changing his mind when he hears Emma calling for him.
  • Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Played with. When Bernie Quinlan becomes pregnant as a result of her affair with Father Matthew, she eventually decides to keep it, despite even the Bishop telling her that it's better to abort it. It does take some thinking about though, so often the arguments come down to who is currently the bigger asshole.
  • Happily Married: In a community where it seems every married couple is either busy committing adultery, wanting to commit adultery, or just blatantly hating each other, Susan and Arthur Thwaites are probably the only ones with anything resembling a genuinely healthy marriage, with their only onscreen fight occurring when Susan attempts to prevent Arthur from confronting Danny (whom Arthur believes to be responsible for their daughter's death).
  • Hot for Preacher: Bernadette "Bernie" Quinlan has a disastrous affair with Father Matthew, the local Catholic priest, and gets pregnant by him, to find herself blamed and disowned by the Church and facing a marriage break-up.
  • Insistent Terminology: During the trial in series 2, Lucy is adamant that she had previously "shagged" Pete and Jed before the rape. This is then turned on its head when she's asked if she shagged Danny and she insists that she didn't - she "made love" to him instead.
  • Interrogation Montage: A fairly humorous example occurs after someone runs over Chef several times in a row and severely cripples him. A few seconds of each interrogation is shown in which absolutely no one expresses any degree of sympathy for Chef and most even say they wish they'd done it, topped off with Danny sarcastically confessing despite being the witness to the event and Chef's wife smugly acknowledging that Chef's philandering had resulted in far too many enemies with both means and opportunity to be able to meaningfully discount anyone.
  • Irony: Chef threatens to castrate Alfie upon identifying him as his wife's lover. At the end of the series, Chef's the one being castrated after refusing to stop committing adultery himself.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Danny may be an obnoxious, heavily sarcastic, abrasive brat of a compulsive gambler with a tendency to piss off everyone, but he doesn't think twice before potentially putting himself in danger in order to attempt to save three young girls from drowning, is willing to withstand huge amounts of abuse (including an attempted drowning) if it means his wife won't get hurt by finding out his addiction meant he broke his promise to stop gambling, and is able to overlook a huge (and understandable) personal vendetta to side with Lucy after her claims of rape because he honestly believes her (even if he's not particularly nice about it).
  • Karma Houdini:
  • Laser-Guided Karma:
    • Of the few characters who even believe that Lucy was raped, most of them also express this sentiment to her at some point, pointing to the numerous times she'd led men on as well as her actions towards Danny in the first series.
    • Chef, a highly sadistic serial adulterer, is severely crippled after a deliberate hit-and-run (and receives absolutely no sympathy from anyone), and after he still refuses to change his ways ends the series having been castrated.
  • Lingerie Scene: Philandering bully and village psychopath Gary Alcock ("Chef") makes his wife's life a misery with violence, the threat of violence, and frequent undisguised affairs. After he is (deliberately) knocked down and temporarily paralysed, Ruth Alcock gets her own back by dressing in the sexiest underwear possible for a night out and an equally undisguised affair, and as she dresses in the classic black set, tells her bedridden husband in explicit detail what she intends to do that night, and for him not to wait up for her. She blows him a kiss on the way out of the bedroom door.
  • Oop North: The Lake District of Cumbria is just south of the Scottish border. For context, the Lake District is as far Oop North as you can get in England before beginning to encounter people in kilts.
  • Parental Abandonment: Of the emotional kind - Lucy tells Danny in series 2 that she thinks she acts the way she does because she wants to matter and that her parents only wanted to see her as something they could display. Mr Archer even seems to acknowledge this by the end of the series, angrily telling his wife that it's their fault Lucy turned out how she did because neither of them were ever there for her when it really mattered.
  • Rape as Drama: Lucy Archer's rape, and its consequences, drives the storyline and highlights the divisions and social tensions within the community.
  • Sanity Slippage: Mr Parr/Fisher was already close to losing it right at the start of the show, being paranoid that his wife was having an affair. Once that suspicion is confirmed, it pushes him right to the edge. In series 2, both he and his sister-in-law appear to jump right off the slippery slope together after he murders his wife and she discovers the body.
  • Scenery Porn: the series was filmed in and around the Lake District National Park.
  • Shaming the Mob: Father Matthew attempts to do this on behalf of Danny after most of the town become certain that he was responsible for the boating accident, explicitly stating the fact that the rumours they've all heard concerning Danny's guilt are just flat-out lies. It doesn't really work since by the end of the episode, Danny is attacked and almost drowned himself and the town remains convinced of his guilt right up until the inquest.
  • Silent Scapegoat: Of a kind. Even though Danny repeatedly asserts that the accident wasn't his fault and that Lucy is lying because of a personal vendetta, he's still ultimately willing to shoulder the majority of the blame and take the resulting abuse from everyone else if it means his alibi will stay a secret purely for the sake of not wanting to reveal to Emma that he broke his promise about never gambling again. Father Matthew tells Emma as much as proof that Danny does care about her.
  • Sunday Evening Drama Series: It was screened late night on Sunday for several very good reasons - sex, violence, murder, and swearing.
  • Teen Pregnancy: Even though most of the characters' ages aren't stated, since Emma was due to go to university when she met Danny, it's reasonable to assume she's around 18 years old when she gets pregnant.
  • Underdogs Never Lose: John is a tweedy, nervous man whose with a condescending and adulterous wife. He kills her, ends up with her sister, gets Chef castrated, and apparently gets acquitted.
  • Woman Scorned:
    • The main reason for Lucy's lies about Danny in series 1 is because he turned her down.
    • Ruth, Chef's wife, orchestrates a very elaborate sequence of revenge against her husband that ultimately results in his total humiliation and castration. Beverley assists in the coverup of Simone's murder in part because Simone seduced her teenage crush.

Top