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.”