With Nicola Walker and the Catalan sunshine, The Split – Barcelona proves an unexpected festive treat
“None of us is immune from fucking up the best of lives, the best of marriages”
After a perfect final beat in the last series of The Split, it really didn’t feel like we needed more. We might have wanted it, Abi Morgan’s rom-com-drama having delighted over three series and given a doozy of a leading role for Nicola Walker in Hannah Defoe, a leading divorce lawyer whose tangled personal life is reflected in the wider family with whom she lives and works. But even when The Split – Barcelona, a two-part special was announced, I was sceptical.
More fool I, for it made for a delightful return to the world of the Defoes, transplanted as the title suggests to Barcelona, where Hannah’s daughter Liv is set to marry the dishy Gael in the lush surroundings of his family’s vineyard in the Catalan countryside. The whole gang is in tow too – all-knowing mother Ruth, chaotic sisters Nina and Rose and their other halves, ex-husband and father-of-the-bride Nathan, plus Gael’s family and their brooding lawyer Archie.
We discover early on that Hannah has been on a few hot dates with Archie but scared of venturing properly back into the world of love, ended up ghosting him. Whilst his surprise appearance at her daughter’s wedding amuses everyone, there’s obstacles aplenty between them and Walker and Toby Stephens play them out beautifully, two bruised souls unsure how or even if they should move forward, the diversion into professional competition makes for exquisite foreplay in their tentative dance.
Elsewhere, Fiona Button and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith are fun as Rose and Glen navigate the next steps of their blended family life and Annabel Scholey is reliably good as Nina, although saddled with the rather thanklessly characterised Julian as a boyfriend, she deserves better. Deborah Findlay could be given more to do as Ruth, but her interventions of acute insight are always perfectly pitched and Findlay radiates such beneficence that too much screen time for her might actually kill us.
Liv and Gael end up almost as sideplayers, their nuptials predictably not running smoothly but acting as they act as the hook for all around them – troubles exposed in current marriages, possibilities hinted at in former ones, proposals, pregnancies and pre-nups – everything is in its right place. Seductive, sun-kissed and slipping down like those chupitos, The Split – Barcelona more than justifies its return and if Nicola Walker’s Hannah Defoe becomes the new Christmas TV staple, then who are we to argue.
