"A Coming to Terms for Billy", shown as part of the fourteenth and final season of "Play for Today", is the third in a trilogy of television dramas by the Ulster playwright Graham Reid about the Martin family from a working-class Protestant area of Belfast. The action takes place about a year after the events of the second instalment, "A Matter of Choice for Billy", which in turn was set about a year after the first, "Too Late to Talk to Billy".
Billy has now moved out of the family home and is living with his Catholic girlfriend Pauline, who has given up her ambition of emigrating to Canada. His old friend Ian tries to persuade him to join his window-cleaning business, but Billy, who has doubts about Ian's business acumen, is reluctant to do so. Billy's sister Lorna is left to look after their two younger sisters Ann and Maureen and their disreputable old Uncle Andy. Their father Norman, who only appeared briefly in a flashback in the second instalment, reappears when he pays a visit to Belfast with his second wife Mavis, whom he has married in England.
Norman, once a heavy-drinking hard man whose solution to every problem was to lash out at it with his fists, appears to have turned over a new leaf and at first seems much more easy-going and approachable than he was in "Too Late to Talk to Billy". It is not long, however, before family tensions start to reappear, especially between Norman and Billy and between Norman and Andy. Both Billy and Andy resent the way Norman treated his first wife Janet, Billy's mother and Andy's sister, who is now dead. A particular source of contention is Norman's wish to take Ann and Maureen back to live with him and Mavis in England, something Billy opposes, thinking the girls should remain in the only home they have ever known.
"Too Late to Talk to Billy" was one of the best of the "Play for Today" series, a powerful and well-acted family drama. I do not, however, think either of its sequels are quite in the same class. "A Matter of Choice for Billy" suffered from the absence of the towering figure of Norman who supplied so much of the tension in the first episode. Although he returns in "A Coming to Terms for Billy", he is not quite the unstoppable force of nature he once was. The title, with its reference to "coming to terms", suggests some kind of peaceful resolution, and Reid certainly seemed to be trying for some sort of happy ending to the trilogy rather than a tragic one. The standard of acting, as in both the previous instalments, was good, but I felt that neither of the latter parts of the trilogy really measured up to the first in terms of dramatic power. 7/10.
