Set in Yorkshire, Róisín McBrinn directs for Clean Break, a story about a family divided by a history of child abuse by their deceased father, Mr Dixon.  Mary, or Mrs Dixon (Brid Brennan) has just been released from serving three months in prison of a six month sentence for covering up abuse.  As Mary arrives home, Mary’s granddaughter Ella (Yazmin Kayani) and Mary’s daughter Julie (Andrea Lowe) are ready to jump out and shout “Surprise!” But Mary is not in the mood for surprises.  

Mary is really angry at being imprisoned and her first thoughts are to clean up her husband’s graffitied grave in the same way as her denial is cleaning up his memory.  Ella thank goodness is too young, and too protected, to have been abused by her grandfather and is the success of the family, an undergraduate at a university in Leeds.  It is Tina now renamed Briana (Alison Fitzjohn) and Julie who bear the scars of abuse.

I’m not sure as to Briana’s relationship to Mary but it seems that she was perhaps fostered when Julie was six and Bernie (Liz White) was three years old.  Brianna was that much older and she is convinced that she was chosen, to divert Mr Dixon’s paedophilic attention away from Julie and Bernie, by a knowing and complicit Mary.  Brianna has had some contact with Julie while Mary was in prison but Mary insists on seeing Briana as a liar who destroyed her husband’s good name.