School’s out and French is over! The annual British festival of unlearning any foreign languages you picked up in class can begin. “J’ai voudrais un vodka,” says one monoglot schoolgirl as she prepares for a summer of getting off her nut with her mates in Bolton. Think it through, young lady. You don’t use an auxiliary verb when conjugating in the conditional. Somebody is going to be in for a disappointment when GCSE results come out later this month.
As is our heroine, Rochelle. “That last question?” she tells Wren of the exam paper. “I copied down all the French from the back of that,” she says, waving her mineral-water bottle. How disappointing for an examiner who had been looking forward to a run-through of the plot of Camus’ L’Étranger only to be confronted with the ingredients for Volvic.
But Rochelle has got bigger problems than her looming French fail. Her phone is haunted. Sadly, this isn’t part of the 100Gbps data bundle from Giffgaff, but something – where is caps lock? – MORE SINISTER. An app called Red Rose is corrupting Bolton school leavers’ phones, as if it were bent on turning their lives into a task-fixated video game. Which, if you read the latest philosophy of virtuality, is pretty much where we are heading.
This is the premise for the entertaining and disturbing Red Rose (BBC Three). No matter that it is very similar to the premise of Black Mirror’s 2016 episode Shut up and Dance, in which a teenage boy downloads what he thinks is an anti-malware program called Shrive that films him masturbating to pornography and then threatens to make the footage go viral unless he performs increasingly horrible tasks, up to and including murder.
Something similar happens to Rochelle. An invitation to download the app pops up on her screen and, like a mug, she presses download. Red Rose is soon issuing imperious demands. Unless she kisses Noah at a house party, footage of her queueing for cereal at a food bank will appear on TV screens around the house.
Rochelle doesn’t want to kiss Noah, because her mate Wren, Noah’s girlfriend, will go postal. Nonetheless, she does – and she does. (It doesn’t seem to occur to Rochelle, Wren or the scriptwriter that anyone who would tease a mate for using a food bank is no mate at all, but still.)
There is another problem: the party soundtrack. Who rewound us back to the 90s? Faithless’s Insomnia? Rhythm Is a Dancer by Snap!? Aqua’s Barbie Girl? If this is what the kids are getting down to this summer, they have bigger problems than bad grades.
But what makes Red Rose more insidious than anything that spooled from Charlie Brooker’s laptop six years ago is that the app is Jekyll as much as Hyde. When Rochelle’s power cuts out and she hasn’t got any money for the meter, she suddenly finds it has been credited with £100. And when she worries she has nothing to wear for the party, she wakes up one morning to find a sparkly dress on the washing line. We don’t know what Red Rose is yet, but it is not impossible that it is the ghost of future Rishi Sunak, easing the cost of living crisis with random acts of ill-conceived taxpayer-funded largesse.
But the Sunak hypothesis is far-fetched. After all, before the opening credits, we saw a girl the previous Christmas being tormented in a flat in Manchester. No matter how many times she shouts: “Alexa, turn everything off!” her phone, TV and air conditioning continue to go rogue. All her devices are controlled by some scarcely comprehensible malignant force that drives her to do something fatal. Such is Red Rose, which is more Liz Truss than Sunak in my book.
Later, Wren and Rochelle’s friendship is put under further stress when Red Rose changes their innocuous texts into abusive ones. Rochelle picks up her phone and sees footage of her dead mother. “She misses you, too,” says Red Rose. But does she? The last message from Red Rose to Rochelle in this bravura opening episode is of two twins she should be babysitting when she is attending this grotesque party. On her phone, the two girls appear, plaintively wondering where she is. A figure looms behind them, saying: “Don’t worry, I’ll look after them.” The woman is Rochelle’s mother, looking like a zombie straight from The Walking Dead. Which betokens nothing good, clearly.
The creators, Michael and Paul Clarkson, have previous with horror hokum (they produced The Haunting of Bly Manor), but here they make something more engaging. The two leads, Rochelle (Isis Hainsworth) and Wren (Amelia Clarkson), are up to their necks in plausible teenage vexation, already featuring poverty, childcare, broken homes and our old friend wastrel dads.
What does Red Rose want and why is it taking over the lives of these schoolgirls? We will find out in the next few episodes. And, if it is a hit, there will be a Yorkshire-set sequel called White Rose; just see if there isn’t. My guess is that Red Rose may not just be a metaphor for the malware that is late capitalism, but also unwitting commentary on the diabolical forces behind the Tory leadership race.
