White Heat, BBC Two, review That's the theory, of which there may be a little too much in White Heat. University is also the kind of place where you might develop an affectation for Brechtian drama, and in practice, the opening episode has unintentionally made a stab at this alienating style. The characters practically buckle under the weight of their social, sexual and racial distinctions. There's a rebellious posh boy, a proto-feminist middle-class girl, a Northern Irish overweight angel, a sexually liberated northern girl, a Midlands gay Asian, a Geordie working-class politico and a Caribbean law student. They don't even study the same subjects let alone have the same hair colour. The idea is that posh boy Jack is setting up a radical life experiment, but Milne turns each character into such a cipher it feels more like a game of Guess Who than a plausible dramatic conceit. One character says, "I feel like someone out there is living the life I should have led," and you want to shout back, "No wonder! You're not a character, you're a social stereotype. Still, there might be hope for the show. Although a vision of teal and burnt orange walls and mini skirts, White Heat goes relatively light on the period eye candy and avoids lazy use of music to send us back in time. The story is also framed by a modern-day thriller element, where the friends in the present are gathered together in the same house, now Ikea-ed to within an inch of its life, because someone has died. Despite their cartoon pasts they seemed to have grown into enigmatic, interesting people, largely down to the acting talent of Lindsay Duncan and Juliet Stevenson. That might turn out to be the real revolution.