Five-year-old Joe Hughes hums 1970s pop rather than answering questions, a quirk his parents Morven Christie and Lee Ingleby turn into a running family joke until a paediatric assessment delivers the word they keep repeating: autism. The six-part first series, filmed in Keswick and Coniston, tracks the fallout across three generations, from grandfather Christopher Eccleston’s gruff refusal to “label” his grandson to uncle Greg McHugh and wife Vinette Robinson confronting their own fertility crisis. Peter Bowker’s adaptation of Keren Margalit’s Israeli drama “Yellow Peppers” keeps diagnosis on the edge of everyday domestic rows, never the centre.
Series two and three widen the lens. Joe, now eight, starts mainstream school with an overworked classroom assistant while his teenage half-sister Molly Wright juggles first love and resentment at the family’s revolving door of therapists. The Hughes’s struggling brewery, scenic but financially leaking, becomes a stand-in for wider cuts to rural services, a subplot Bowker threaded after local parents told him respite care had vanished. By the final run, Joe speaks more but the family still mishear one another; the closing scene has him choose the music for a funeral, a quiet assertion of agency that lands harder than any speech about acceptance.
Production Details
BBC One / 3 Seasons / 18 Episodes / 2016
Created by: Keren Margalit
Showrunner(s): Avi Nir, Patrick Spence, Peter Bowker
Writer(s): Peter Bowker
Producer(s): Marcus Wilson (Series 1) Jenny Frayn (Series 2) Clare Shepherd (Series 3)
Main Cast
Max Vento as Joe Hughes
Molly Wright as Rebecca Hughes
Morven Christie as Alison Hughes
Lee Ingleby as Paul Hughes
Matt Greenwood as Tom Clarke
Thomas Gregory as Luke Taylor
George Bukhari as Terry
Adam Wittek as David Nowak
Julia Krynke as Maya Petrenko
Vinette Robinson as Nicola Daniels
Tommie Grabiec as Pavel Kaminski
Ralf Little as Stuart
