The Last Anniversary, review: it couldn't be more ‘beach read' if it came with a bottle of sun cream

Telegraph

24-05-2025

The BBC has bought an adaptation of a Liane Moriarty novel and stuck it in the Saturday night slot, which is where TV dramas go to die. Moriarty gave us the more-ish thriller Big Little Lies, and while The Last Anniversary (BBC One) is superficially similar – the main characters are all women who live by the sea – it is dull as ditch water.
The synopsis couldn't be more 'beach read' if it came with a free bottle of sun cream: 'When Sophie Honeywell mysteriously inherits a house on Scribbly Gum Island, her arrival threatens to unearth secrets held close by the three generations of women who call the island home.' Scribbly Gum Island sounds promisingly funny, but it's not. It's just the kind of name you get in Moriarty's native Australia, where the series is set.
Miranda Richardson, wearing a long, grey wig, is the best-known cast member to British viewers, and you may recognise Danielle Macdonald as the quirky cop from The Tourist. It's an ensemble piece, but the focus of the first episode is Sophie (Teresa Palmer), who is surprised to learn that she has inherited the Scribbly Gum house from Connie, the family matriarch. It's mostly a surprise because Sophie is a relative stranger who last saw the brood when she was jilting Connie's nephew. Still, moving onto an island surrounded by Connie's hostile relatives is preferable to her current set-up in the city, where she is struggling through IVF treatment and going on dates with terrible men.
A subplot briefly takes us back to 1974, when Connie and her sister Rose (Richardson) rescued an abandoned baby whose parents had suddenly upped and left. This has come to be known as the Baby Munro Mystery and has so intrigued Australians that family members run tours of the house where the child was found. It is now filled with props, including a replica of the marble cake discovered cooling on the worktop on that fateful night. The recipe for it is available to buy in the island gift shop. This tour takes place at the beginning of episode one and suggests that the series will be off-beat, but instead we simply get an uninspired soap opera in which Miranda Richardson does a lot of wild swimming.
Multi-generational family sagas can work well in a novel, and perhaps this one does, but as a TV show it's dramatically inert. Scenes are just there to mark time until another skeleton falls out of the closet, One of the characters battles postnatal depression after a traumatic birth and there are dark moments, but mostly it just looks nice, with the pleasantly sound-tracked shots of Sophie moving into her new home resembling an advert for a building society. There is a meet-cute at a funeral. The worst detail of all is that, when Connie and Rose took in the baby whose parents mysteriously disappeared, they named her… Enigma.
I confess that I couldn't make it to the last episode without giving up. I googled the ending instead, because life's too short.