Going Wrong: Part One

Guy Curran and Leonora Chisholm meet as teenagers, and the gap between them is visible from the start. He leads a street gang. She comes from a middle-class home, a world away from his, and her family would never approve of him. They are lovers for three years anyway, until life does what it does and pulls them apart. Guy builds a business and prospers. Leonora goes to college and then into her first job. For most people the story would end there.

But they meet again years later, and Leonora is perfectly pleasant, which somehow makes it worse. There is someone else in her life now, she tells him, and that simple sentence undoes something in Guy. Disappointment hardens into obsession, and obsession keeps feeding on itself. Her family and her friends, people like Tessa Mandeville and the wider Chisholm circle, begin to feel the weight of it. The first part of the story watches that madness take hold of a man who had every reason to just walk away.

Julian Bond wrote it, Matthew Evans directed, and it first went out on 2 June 1998. James Callis plays Guy Curran, with Josephine Butler as Leonora. Daniel Caltagirone is Danny Danilo and Hosh Kane takes Linus Pinedo. Around them, Sara Kestelman plays Tessa Mandeville, Jack Tanner is Robin Chisholm, Philip Locke takes Magnus Mandeville, Kate Lynn Evans plays Susannah Chisholm, Sylvester Morand is Anthony Chisholm and Tenniel Evans appears as the Coroner.

The performance to watch is Callis, because Guy has to stay believable while his grip on reality loosens. Nothing about him is a caricature. He is a successful man with feelings that have outgrown his judgment, and that is scarier than any villain's leer. This is the first of three parts, and every brick of the trouble to come is laid right here. He has convinced himself that the version of the past he remembers is the true one, and that belief is doing the damage. And the nostalgia Guy carries around is not the life Leonora lived. It never was.