Alice and Jack review: Channel 4's drama is an attempt at sweeping romance, but it has a black hole at its centre

The drama aimed for an epic, sweeping look at love through time but made everything look so difficult that you really didn't want to sweep along with them.

Alice (Andrea Riseborough) meets Jack (Domhnall Gleeson) in a bar on a date sometime in the past – it's never entirely clear when, although neither of them have smartphones, which dates it to the early Noughties.

She is brutally intelligent, firing questions at Jack about his job as a research scientist and coming to some fairly major conclusions about Jack's personality – to the point of rudeness.

But never mind, Jack’s immediately smitten, Alice – being a woman who knows exactly what she wants – takes him home and they sleep together.

In the early hours, Alice kicks him out of her flat, although not without some conversation which so odd that you imagine real people couldn’t possibly speak like that.

“You're kind, and you're handsome and you’re a good lover. You’re wonderful,” Alice tells Jack as he pulls on his socks, bleary-eyed, just before she tells him she doesn’t want to see him again.

Three months later, and a newly-bearded Jack has a scientific breakthrough at work, and – after one, fairly weird date – decides the person he has to call is Alice.

They meet up, Alice takes him home again, pauses to shave off his beard and then they sleep together again, before engaging in more gnomic dialogue.

“If I was careful with anything in this world, it would be you.”

“You weren’t though. Careful.”

“I know. I’ll try to be. I understand that... that this is different.”

The next day, Alice has a temper tantrum when they're having an otherwise lovely time in an art gallery, and Jack doesn't see her again for 18 months, in which time he's heartbroken, gets over his heartbreak, meets someone else, she gets pregnant, they get married and they have the baby after a brief ethical struggle.

And then Alice pitches up again, and Jack is powerless to resist her.

The motivations for Alice and Jack being together are a mystery – she's rude and controlling, he's gentle and quietly ambitious – and in real life Jack would have given everything up as a bad job.

And when they’re together, in a relationship which should crackle and spark, the screen seems to dim and your shoulders sag and you feel ‘oh no, it's these two again’.

It's problematic, because you’re supposed to get lost in the central romance, but it’s very noticeable that, by the end of episode two, you’d much rather spend time with their friends than Alice and Jack.

Jack’s new wife Lynne (Aisling Bea) and his friend and work colleague Paul (Sunil Patel) are warm and funny and – crucially – believable.

They're much better people than our two – seemingly doomed – lovers, and everything’s better when they’re on screen.

Meanwhile, there are flashbacks to the incidents which made Alice who she is – a device which has become hackneyed in TV dramas these days – Alice and Jack mumble and mope, and a crucial event happens in episode two involving a death at a funeral and TV news report which beggars belief.

As a love story, designed to be full of heat and passion, it’s a cold fish and will have you deleting your dating apps in a frenzy.