The Trial, review: a kind of Adolescence-lite, with laughs

Telegraph

08-05-2025

If you're determined not to watch Adolescence, there's always The Trial (Channel 5). Think of it as Adolescence-lite, with laughs.
We're in 2035, and a new law has been introduced. When a minor is arrested for a serious crime, their parents can be charged as accessories if deemed by The Office of Judicial Inquisition to have failed at parenting. The mum and dad in this case, David and Dionne Sinclair, are smugly middle-class and refuse to believe that they are at fault. Although Dionne worries that their darling daughter's friends may have led her astray: 'Last month some of her Earth warrior besties paint-bombed that NCT coffee morning, remember?'
If this line of dialogue sounds as if it could be from a dystopian episode of Outnumbered, it's partly because Dionne is played by that sitcom's lead actress, Claire Skinner. While this is billed as a drama, the casting of Derry Girls' Saoirse-Monica Jackson as the Judicial Inquisitor just adds to the idea that we shouldn't be taking any of it too seriously. The Inquisitor is icy and humourless, but you keep expecting her to start gurning and cracking jokes.
Dionne is a career woman who was never really sold on the idea of having a baby. As David, Ben Miles is a stay-at-home dad who did media studies and insists that his daughter, Teah (India Fowler), is kindness personified. 'Only last year, she donated her annual NHS budget to an economically-challenged Glasgow family. That kind of attitude isn't created in a vacuum,' he declares. Writer Mark Burt has fun with these little details of an imagined future.
Occasionally, there are smart insights dotted around the satire. One of the themes in the Netflix show was the ways in which parents can f--k up their kids (to paraphrase Larkin) without realising. Not just letting them spend hours online because it seems safer than hanging about on street corners, but the small stuff, like taking them to football practice every weekend and failing to hide your disappointment when they're not very good at it.
In The Trial, it turns out that Dionne had shared her early misgivings about motherhood with seven-year-old Teah; David let Teah watch coverage of flood disasters in Bangladesh, which turned her into a militant mini-Greta. Both parents thought their daughter was a bright kid who could handle this information. 'You confused intellect with emotional maturity,' says the Inquisitor, and that might just make you think about what you share with your children and how it could affect them.
The interrogation involves asking the couple to go through their history, right back to the first date, and we watch their relationship crumble before our eyes. The drama veers into silliness and packs no emotional punch, but it's an ambitious idea packed into an hour-long slot. In an era of box sets and series dragged out for eight episodes when they could be done and dusted in three, Channel 5 deserves credit for bringing back what is essentially a Play for Today format.