David Tennant's New Comedy Drama There She Goes Is The Times TV Pick Of The Week



David Tennant's new comedy drama, There She Goes, is The Times TV Pick Of The Week.

The five part series centres on a severely learning disabled nine year-old girl Rosie (Miley Locke), her dad Simon (David Tennant), mum Emily (Jessica Hynes) and brother Ben (Edan Hayhurst).All the stories and characters are drawn from the real life experience of writer Shaun Pye, whose daughter was born in 2006 with an extremely rare and to date undiagnosed chromosomal disorder. Each episode shines a light on day to day life with Rosie - unique experiences from simply trying to take her to the park to trying to explain that every day isn’t her birthday. A second timeline set in 2006 shows the effect having a severely disabled child had on the family unit, how it threatened to disintegrate but ultimately brought them even closer.


Read The Times preview below:

There She Goes (Tuesday, BBC4, 10pm)
“Never stops, does it?” calls a well-meaning neighbour to Simon (David Tennant) as he and his wife, Emily (Jessica Hynes), carry their angry nine-year-old daughter Rosie (Miley Locke), who has severe learning disabilities, into their car. The neighbour’s child, meanwhile, has her cello on her back, heading off to her music lesson; the attempt to empathise falls flat. It is just one of many raw moments in this Bible-black comedy-drama by Shaun Pye, who drew on his own experiences as the parent of a daughter born with a rare chromosomal disorder to write this. The gallows humour might be a bit tough for some viewers to stomach: when Emily announces she is making her daughter look like a “princess”, she adds “Westeros, not Frozen, obviously”. The show also plays a dangerous game in making Simon — initially at least — selfish and acid-tongued, yet There She Goes never tries to sentimentalise the family’s day-to-day reality, indicating that parents don’t have to be saints every second of the day to be full of love.

There She Goes starts tomorrow at 10pm on BBC Four.

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