The Children by Lucy Kirkwood is a life-or-death drama about three ageing boffins invited to fix a broken atomic power station and save Britain from nuclear disaster. There’s one snag: radiation poisoning will end their lives. Should the old crocks accept the kamikaze mission?

The setting for this macabre tale is a cosy farmhouse occupied by 64-year-old Hazel (Meera Syal) and her chattering Irish husband Robin (Declan Conlon). Their colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) shows up after many decades working abroad and she urges them to join the suicidal engineers working on the radioactive site.

The stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much

The stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much

The script contains a lot of chit-chat that relates only tenuously to the main story. The characters are old friends from university and they face an unresolved romantic dilemma. Rose dated Robin who married Hazel but kept Rose as a side-option for years afterwards. Hazel knows about their affair and she assumes that Rose has arrived to steal Robin from her. This creates some amusing scenes of conflict and jealousy but the stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much.

And the........

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