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The annual award for breaking hearts goes to... Sheridan Smith: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last weekend's TV

By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 16:35 EST, 3 May 2015 | Updated: 04:00 EST, 4 May 2015

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The C-Word

Rating:

Home Fires

Rating:

Out of mercy to all the other actresses, can we please just guarantee a major TV award every year to Sheridan Smith and have done with it? We could call it her auto-BAFTA.

She won the Best Actress award in 2013 as the Great Train Robber’s missus, Mrs Biggs, and she’s up for it again this year after making us whoop and cry in Cilla, the biopic about Miss Black.

Now Sheridan’s broken our hearts again, playing Lisa Lynch, a raucous, gobby, heroic woman, who was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 28 and who charted her defiant struggle against the disease in a blog and a book.

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Sheridan’s broken our hearts again, playing Lisa Lynch, a young woman diagnosed with cancer, in The C-Word (BBC1)

Television doesn’t often know what to do with terminal illness. There was a telling moment in one of the set-pieces, a wedding, when Lisa walked into the church to see her brother get married, and half the congregation looked around and then pretended they hadn’t seen her.

That’s what TV usually does, too. The diagnosis can make dramatic viewing, and so do deathbed scenes, but the stuff in-between — especially when it’s mundane and messy — gets ignored. The camera looks away, as if it’s embarrassed.

The alternative approach is to dwell on the mawkish and the miserable, inviting viewers to enjoy a ghoulish wallow. The C-Word (BBC1) didn’t do either.

Right from the outset Lisa made it clear that she had no time for self-pity. While her husband sat and sobbed, and her mother was threatening to punch an oncologist, Smith’s character was deciding how to deal with the news.

A clumsy, melodramatic script would have had her slapping hubby Pete (Paul Nicholls) and ordering him to pull himself together. What Lisa did was much more effective: she told him firmly she couldn’t control her illness but she was determined to control how she coped with it.

Television doesn’t often know what to do with terminal illness, but writer Nicola Taylor’s script cleverly drew out subtle reflections on how, for instance, the rest of life doesn’t stop just because you’re dying

Sheridan Smith stars as cancer patient Lisa Lynch in The C Word

That thought hit him like a bucket of cold water. He could stay in charge of himself, too, if he chose.

This straightforward, honest attitude was an inspiration to the countless readers of Lisa’s online journal, but it came at a cost. She couldn’t afford to waste a minute on denial and platitudes — there was no false comfort, no ‘making lemonade from lemons’.

Instead, she was ruthlessly matter-of-fact, even when the cancer delivered appalling secondary shocks. She was ready for the nausea that accompanied chemotherapy, but not for the mood swings or the tragic side-effect that she would be infertile.

Her courage made this 90-minute drama bearable, but it wasn’t just about bravery. Writer Nicola Taylor’s script cleverly drew out subtle reflections, on how, for instance, the rest of life doesn’t stop just because you’re dying: Lisa and Pete still needed to pay their mortgage.

And when Lisa’s specialist recommended a two-month break in her treatment, so that the couple could enjoy one last spell of relative normality, they barely knew what to do with themselves at first — a truthful depiction of how life adapts itself to even the worst situations, until the crisis becomes the new average.

The first episode of Home Fires (ITV), a period drama of parish politics and village hall skulduggery at a Women’s Institute, was more interested in the male characters

The onrushing crisis in August 1939 was the backdrop for Home Fires (ITV), a period drama of parish politics and village hall skulduggery at a Women’s Institute.

Based on a true story, told in her book Jambusters by Julie Summers, this should have been a wartime version of Call The Midwife, all bicycles and floral prints with an undercurrent of steely determination.

WARM-UP OF THE WEEKEND

Eight Out Of Ten Cats Does Countdown (C4) returned for a new series, and host Jimmy Carr spent 16 minutes and 30 seconds introducing the panellists, then the Dictionary Corner experts, and then Rachel Riley . . . It was hardly worth bothering with the show after that.

We were expecting plenty of Land Girls and feuding ladies. But the first episode, by Simon Block, was more interested in the male characters: a local GP with lung cancer, the butcher’s son itching to enlist, and a wife-beating novelist.

The bickering between snobby WI president Joyce (Francesca Annis) and her leading rival, hoity-toity Frances (Samantha Bond) could have been played for laughs, in the Mapp And Lucia style. Instead, we were supposed to take it seriously, though it all seemed impossibly trivial with Britain on the brink of war.

This is a six-part series with a strong cast, and when it gets going it should improve. But so far, no WI rosette for this show.