Mr V Mrs: Call the Mediator review: a jaunty approach to a painful process

Mr V Mrs: Call the Mediator (BBC Two, Tuesday)

Even the wilting potted plant in the waiting room can't soften the tense atmosphere between the warring couples waiting to see a mediator. It seems almost cruel to make them sit side by side in the tastefully anonymous reception room. After all, the point of the fly-on-the-wall documentary Mr V Mrs: Call the Mediator is that the now separated couples are so far adrift from each other they can't communicate.

But they have to, usually on two subjects: money, and there are two calculators on the mediator's table; and the custody of their children. The latter, sadly, proves the most difficult to negotiate. National Family Mediation (NFM) in England and Wales offers its services to separated couples as an alternative to expensive court proceedings. Each of the films (there are three) features three couples and for the viewer (this one at least) there's an undeniably prurient element as their dirty linen is given a good airing. We see the couples both in the mediation rooms and then later explaining more to camera about what happened to sunder their relationships.

After 28 years of marriage Sue left Peter: “She left a casserole in the kitchen, the house had never been cleaner,” he says. She went to live with Peter’s old boss and now she wants 50 per cent of the FFH (that’s former family home – separation brings a new lingo). The property market has risen 10 per cent in the intervening year but Peter, an accountant, sticks to his point that the value of the house should be assessed as on the day she left, when, he says “she resigned from this marriage”.

There’s an air of tired familiarity about Sue and Peter: “Did you get parking,” she asks, probably out of habit. Relations between the two other couples are fuelled by acrimony. Jason and Vicky are separated parents struggling to share the parenting of their young daughter but it’s reached the point that they can’t be in the same room so the mediator shuttles between rooms, flip chart in hand, doing a filtered version of he said, she said.

Obviously who doesn't like a nosey around other people's lives but there's something unsettlingly jaunty about Mr V Mrs: Call the Mediator. The title has that game-show reference – even though two of the couples aren't married – and the nod to blockbuster hit drama Call the Midwife. And Zoë Wanamaker's voiceover has the same arched-eyebrow tone she uses in those fly-on-the-wall documentaries about swish hotels.

All that seems to trivialise the very real, hurt-fuelled dilemmas we're witnessing on screen. The background music, with Peter Skellern crooning "Love is the Sweetest thing", adds to that uncomfortable feeling. And curiously for a film presumably aimed at encouraging separating couples into mediation, only two of the three, despite the best efforts of the calm, skilled mediators, have a positive negotiated result.