Marion on Britbox
“Waiting For God” has two villains: retirement home director Harvey Bains, and Tom Ballard’s strung-out daughter-in-law Marion. Geoffrey, the world’s dullest person (fixated on “real ales and DIY” which amounts to contemplating and installing shelves), is a salesman for a company specializing in yogurt and cheese slices. Marion drinks, drugs, cavorts, connives (she’s fixated on her one-day inheritance from Tom, which there’s no reason to think would amount to much) and is generally cruel to those around her. She doesn’t work, except in the episode where Tom gives his son and daughter-in-law a beauty salon franchise, which she—foreshadowing Mick Garvey’s “Benidorm” sunbed shops woes—briskly runs to the ground. Her children are an afterthought, readily abandoned in favor of a chance to leave town with a “known criminal” or a “randy vicar.”
Where Harvey’s a buffoon, Marion is too cold to be ridiculous, and thus an off note for the show itself, which is otherwise more subtle than that. The other characters have dimensions. Not Marion. Everyone thinks Marion’s the worst, and with good reason. She states frankly her belief that old people should die so that their offspring can use their inheritance to “go to Antigua.” She sucks!
But if there were ever a moment for me to find the humanity in Marion, it would be now. The only time her age is explicitly mentioned, it’s Diana countering Marion’s claim to youth by pointing out that she’s 38. Like Marion, I—protagonist of, if not the world, then this newsletter—am 38, and like Marion, the mother of two children. I have only the faintest memory of alcohol, and am not sleeping my way through Bournemouth. (I just had a baby. I’m not even sleeping!) But we have a shared fate, a shared Karenesque basicness of life situation. Aging out of relevance, of a sense that there’s more future than past. Middle age I think it’s called. Whereas retirement home worker Jane Edwards is the same age give or take, she’s a late bloomer. Her future lies—improbably—with Harvey. Marion’s day, whatever it might have been (does she have a family of origin? where are/were they? what was she doing pre-Geoffrey? why no backstory?) is done. 38 is a mood, or as those much younger than 38 might say, a vibe.
Marion gets one hint of nuance in the episode where she and Geoffrey separate and she gets sober. She takes up aerobics. Her only consistent trait is hating Diana. It turns out Marion wasn’t broken, but simply brought down by dreary ol’ Geoff. An old-school feminist message. They get back together (Diana tires of Geoffrey having moved in with Tom, and forces this reunion) and she returns to drinking and promiscuity. (OK the promiscuity hadn’t stopped, some dude appears when she and Diana are chatting.) But the Wholesome Marion interlude reveals that Marion’s been brought down by her situation in life, and is maybe not rotten to her core. This is challenged in Season 5, the last one, where Geoffrey decides Marion is in league with the devil, and makes a persuasive case.
Marion is Diana if Diana hadn’t known her mind, and had led a family life in the suburbs rather than been a proudly single war photojournalist based in London. Diana, in her younger and older days, was fairly sex drugs rock and roll. (Well, sex and drink.) But she wasn’t bad wife or mother because she wasn’t a wife or mother. Marion’s crime isn’t decadence but rather having made promises she couldn’t keep.