Child actors, eh. Don't you just hate them? All those squeaky-clean, trying-too-hard-to-be-winsome wannabe Shirley Temples and Mickey Rooneys who have paraded their saccharine talents on screen and invariably left viewers wishing the brats would be swallowed up by the nearest tyrannosaurus rex or man-eating shark.
Until recently, the notion kids were capable of producing pint-sized performances worthy of De Niro or Deneuve, rather than simply pout and prance precociously in front of the cameras would have been dismissed as laughable. But suddenly, a new generation of children are chipping away at the old prejudices. America's Haley Joel Osment has just wowed Hollywood with a magnificent, potentially Oscar-winning display in the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense and Britain can now boast a comparable talent in the guise of 12-year-old Eric Byrne on the evidence of the whole gamut of emotions he revealed during the opening episode of Tony Marchant's Kid in the Corner (C4, Wednesday).
Straight from the opening vignette of this superbly scripted drama, which focused upon the myriad problems confronted by Alex (Douglas Henshall) and Theresa (Claire Holman), in dealing with their hyperactive son Danny Letts, the latter - as depicted by the debutant Byrne - held you engrossed throughout his flood of tantrums and rampaging behaviour and in the process brought an almost unbearable degree of pathos to this difficult role.
Whether in the title sequence, set within a packed supermarket, or the devastation routinely wrought by little Danny upon the cosy domesticity of the Letts household, the power of the writing was more than equalled by the intensity of Byrne's rage, frustration and inability to control his hearth-wrecking temper.
To his credit, Marchant spared us nothing of the grief encapsulated in this situation. There was the crease-lined brow of Alex's exasperation: "What do you want me to do? Tie him to the bloody trolley?" And the public humiliation and desperation of Theresa. "It is absolutely relentless. We are going from one terrible moment to the next without anything in between. When oh when do I get to love him?"
Naturally, it often made for painful viewing, as this perfectly normal British family self-destructed in an orgy of rows and recriminations, but even amidst the shocking impact of one trauma following another, and the eventual, nigh-inevitable, explosion of violence which was perpetrated by father on son, Marchant skilfully steered us away from the cheap sensationalism of the typical Stateside mini-series with their orchestrated denouements of schmaltz.
Here, he was determined to tell us, was a waking nightmare which could have happened to anybody. You. Me. The couple next door. Fairness didn't come into the equation, as the author knows only too well. His own teenage son suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism, and as Marchant said in advance: "Your biggest responsibility as a dramatist is to tell the truth. Whatever incidents are featured in this programme have already occurred to real-life parents of children with ADHD [Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder] and while there will no doubt be criticism of Kid in the Corner, it will be misplaced because I've only told the truth."
By the conclusion of the opening episode, Theresa had come to recognise that Danny's brain dysfunction was treatable with drugs, but a string of fresh travails lies ahead for this stricken couple over the next two parts, not least from their apparently happy and contented daughter, Lucy, who thus far has appeared untouched by the effects of ADHD.
It was therefore scarcely surprising that Henshall wore the permanent air of a man at the end of his tether, a guise he has developed and refined through his involvement in Orphans, Pyschos, This Life and other such happy-go-lucky offerings. Yet even in his dark despair, his character never tipped over into caricature. "It was awful for me to be asked to beat up my son, but Eric was fine about it. He was less worried than me," revealed this impressive Scottish actor, who may lag behind Robert Carlyle and Ewan McGregor in the fame-and-fortune stakes, but is steadily amassing a significant body of work.
Harrowing the content might be, but Kid in the Corner is nonetheless compelling.
Scotland on Sunday 28th November 1999