CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Listeners

The Listeners (BBC1)

Rating:

Some people describe the sound as a low rumble, or an insistent droning pulse. When I first started to hear it, about 10 years ago, I thought one of our neighbours must have the washing machine on an all-night spin cycle.

The ‘Bristol hum’ comes and goes, occasionally making local headlines as sufferers identify possible new sources, from wind turbines to subsidence. Most people can’t hear it at all. But some who can become so distracted and frustrated by the constant subsonic throb that they flee the city.

Whether she’s in Bristol or some other humming city isn’t spelled out in The Listeners, but Claire (Rebecca Hall) can’t stop hearing it, day and night, at home with her husband Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) or at the school where she teaches.

At first she looks for electrical faults, then 5G communication towers, National Grid pylons and nearby construction projects. When she runs out of her own ideas, she turns to the internet for explanations, which is never a good idea.

Claire has a tendency to hypochondria. When tinnitus is discounted, she makes the leap to worrying about brain tumours. She’s stressed and anxious about stress and anxiety too. Plus, the hum is robbing her of sleep.

Her GP suggests she’s simply menopausal. ‘I’m 41!’ Claire snaps, which just earns her a pitying look.

I sympathise. Once you’re aware of the hum, it’s easy to lie awake, wondering what on earth could be causing it. It helps me to believe it’s something to do with subterranean vibration created by tides in the Bristol Channel — apparently the phenomenon has been observed around the world in other places at the head of a long tidal estuary.

Now when I hear it at night, I tell myself I’m listening to the sea and immediately it stops being an annoyance, and becomes quite soothing.

This theory, though, wouldn’t make much of a drama. As the title of this four-part series implies, Claire isn’t the only one who can hear her hum: Kyle (Ollie West), one of her pupils, reveals it’s plaguing him too, after he keeps dozing off in class.

Kyle is either an accomplished flirt for his age or he has no awareness of personal space, but either way he spends a lot of time standing so close to his teacher that he’s practically in her lap.

Though Claire can’t admit to herself that there’s an illicit attraction, her teenage daughter cottons on straight away. She hasn’t told Paul yet, but she will — she’s already caught her mum on a secret late-night phone call.

That family tension sets a difficult test. It’s hard for viewers to retain sympathy with a teacher who falls for a schoolboy. But Rebecca Hall is the daughter of theatre director Sir Peter Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing, so she’s got the pedigree for challenging roles. It will be intriguing to see how she manages it.