(Photo: Alan Peebles/Courtesy of BBC America)

Robson Green stars as an unemployed steelworks engineer and recently widowed father of two who has decided to build, in his garden, the very first Welsh rocket, in order to send his wife’s ashes up into space. This project, while attracting a cohort of likewise out-of-work engineers, tends to exclude his needy children (Lucy Evans and John Rhys Halliwell). Nor does it do much to help him resume a social life of his own. In the first six episodes, there are misfires, explosions, a chocolate factory, a rock band, parachutes, liquid oxygen, and teen pregnancy, treading a tricky divide between punch lines and sentimentality. Green negotiates this divide with verve as well as nerve, which is no surprise to those of us who have admired him previously in Wire in the Blood and Reckless.

BBC America, Premieres April 18, 10 P.M.

Related:

• Archive: “Television”
• Articles by John Leonard
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