The Split: Barcelona, BBC One review - a soapy special with seasonally adjusted sentimentality

Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. 

The opening scene was Four Weddings by way of Mamma Mia!, as the tribe of Defoe women, led by divorced Hannah (Nicola Walker) and accompanied by her ex-husband Nathan (Stephen Mangan, pictured below, with Annabel Scholey) though not his new wife, descended on Catalonia for the marriage of Hannah and Nathan’s daughter Olivia (Elizabeth Roberts). The women arrived off the flight in mini-bridal veils, but this was not the kind of tacky hen party that now plagues Barcelona. “Liv” had snagged a real beauty, Gael (Alex Guersman), the long-haired, handsome son of a glamorous vineyard-owning couple, at a finca set in stunning grounds where even the guests’ annexe was palatial. Things could only go wrong.

Rewind to the pre-credits sequence, three months earlier: Hannah is at a bar with an attractive lawyer, Archie (Toby Stephens, pictured bottom), and at her witchiest and most flirtatious. Sex is in the air. They are playing a game of posing alternatives for the other to choose between. Such as: “Barrister or solicitor?” Fans of The Split will know this is a loaded question for Hannah, whose life was upended by Christie, a Dutch solicitor she fell in love with but couldn’t abandon her family life in England for when he took a job in New York. She tells Archie about him, but the fuse has been lit; while he is in the loo, she has a flashback to a scene with Christie and realises she can’t deal with more heartbreak yet, so flees, then ghosts him. As Morgan has only two one-hour episodes to cram lots of plot into, it’s no surprise that Hannah arrives at the wedding to find an unexpected guest there – Archie, who turns out, what were the chances, to be the Spanish family’s lawyer and controller of the pre-nup they want Gael and Liv to sign. Hannah has been stalling but now has no easy way to delay the sorting out of terms as her opposite number is there in situ. Worse, Archie is there with an elegant blonde, Wren (Amanda Goldsmith), who’s flashing a large engagement ring.

Gradually, the flaws in this perfect scenario start to gape open. Gael’s mother, Valentina (Romina Cocca), is clearly a tough customer and control freak who has planned every aspect of the weekend down to the last second. Is her ostentatiously loving husband Alvaro (Manu Fullola) as uxorious as he wants people to believe? He gushes that he had experienced a coup de foudre watching Valentina dancing, some 30 years before, and that was it. They drafted a pre-nup on a restaurant napkin while swearing undying love to one another. Seasoned Split-watchers will know this is territory Hannah patrols with a ferocity almost beyond the call of duty. If a pre-nup appears in the script, a divorce is probably in the offing.

His parents’ relationship is one Gael has been seeking, the lodestar of his love life. So when they have a bitter argument, his world falls apart. Meanwhile, Hannah’s is kicking right into gear; and she even has her chief legal aides and advisors there, her mother (Deborah Findlay) and younger sister Nina (Annabel Scholey). 

The scenes between the three sisters are perhaps the best part of this mini-series. All have quick wits and tongues, even the hippyish youngest one, widowed Rose (Fiona Button), who has since fallen for Glen the vicar (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). Their repartee is razor-sharp. Findlay, too, gets to inject some of her usual motherly acid. But the two younger sisters are also given personal mini-crises to deal with. Nina has a “nice, rich" boyfriend, but nobody much likes him because he’s a bit of a prat; he's come along armed with a big-rock ring. And Rose is under pressure to formalise her relationship with widowed Glen and his daughters, while still suffering, like Hannah, from waves of heartbreak after losing both her husband and baby. 

The male roles are much less rewarding, except for Mangan’s. He is the other emotional pole of the piece, the family man who has created a new household in the two years since his divorce and now lives in Notting Hill and sports an earring. Inasmuch as this mini-series ties up some narrative strands left dangling by the denouement of season three, he is the agent of the closure, in a poignant scene towards the end. Stephens has to work hard to build up a comparable head of emotional steam as a lonely divorcé, and almost pulls it off. But the whole has an air of pat box-ticking, oddly reminiscent of the finale of Four Weddings and a Funeral but not as witty. Walker even has to deliver embarrassing speeches reminiscent of Hugh Grant trying to tell a woman he loves her.

In Hannah she has fleshed out an adorable character, honest and smart, mischievous and funny, but now plausibly unsure of herself as a sexual being. With luck, this isn’t the last we see of her.

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