Reviews

Linda the Plant's Preposterous Plots seem to be entirely shameless. An equivalent of the denouement of this would be Clint Eastwood facing off with Lee Van Cleefe and, after the tremendous build up of tension, a buzzard drops a rock on Lee's head. Total eclipse of dramatic climax.

A good old-fashioned Cold-war thriller that resembles Len Deighton more than John LeCarre (especially as one of Deighton's books was entitled Berlin Game.) It certainly has the slow pace of the masters in order to facilitate character development as the personalities of the people that play the game are intrinsic to the plot. It's beautifully shot and the scenery is very 1970, although there are far too few cars in shot for it to resemble central London. Still, can't complain as these things cost the cash that the Beeb is usually strapped for.

A few anomalies in the script could have been avoided, though. Why did the KGB pretend to kill Julia instead of making Joe do their wicked will by pressing a gun to her head? Why wasn't Joe chief suspect from the start? But these pale into insignificance beside the scene in the last part where Sarah meets her husband in the safe-house without thinking that the room is certain to be bugged. Beans spilled all over the show after 25 years of great care to ensure against such mishaps. In the annals of great TV dramas, this rates as a schoolboy-howler.

Still an enjoyable, pleasingly-retro, thriller. Those of us who enjoyed LeCarre and Deighton will have a nice glow of nostalgia whilst watching this one and the youngsters can learn how TV drama should be done.

Eminently entertaining! The plots are densely interwoven and they kept me gripped, often in spite of myself. It's all so elegant and well acted that it draws one in to be pampered by it's ornate splendour. I enjoyed the most recent episode where they drew so many threads together and niftily contrived some reversals of stereotype. Racial prejudice is gently gone over, (It was actually embedded in the culture and ruthlessly applied in those days) and reversed for the sake of variety, so Lord Sinderby is shown to be the one concerned with a mixed-race marriage. His thoughts can be summed up as 'They're all very nice but I wouldn't want my son to marry one'. The Earl is far more urbane but I'm sure that there's some unspoken thoughts drifting through his mind such as 'Some of 'em have bank accounts this big.' Any historian could build a career out of picking holes in Downton but they're welcome to their ivory towers and leave the rest of us to merrily suspend belief and disbelief and enjoy the entertainment.

Excellent adaptation that's as good as most Brit dramatisations and better than many. I watched it again on YouTube and found it just as riveting as first time round with some superb performances from David Kelly, Donal McCann, Bryan Murray, Cyril Cusack, Angela Harding and, of course, the luminescent Peter O'Toole.

The tale follows the lives of those caught up in the almost perpetual struggle of labour versus Employer, always emphasising the human dimensions over the tub-thumping, nationalistic or moralising that it could easily have succumbed to. The pernicious Brits are rarely mentioned by name and the middle class landlord and factory owners may have English accents but we aren't told where they were born. This works well because the plight of those good people speaks for itself and gives us an understanding of the stresses underpinning the revolution without any rabble-rousing rhetoric. Indeed the drama could have been played out in London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Middlesborough, Manchester or any other industrial city. The poverty of Dublin was pretty much the same as the poverty of anywhere else - just the grinding lack of anything but muck and drudgery.

So it's the people of Dublin, and the fights they fight against horrible circumstances, who are the point of it all. Bob Fitzpatrick, whose understated, indomitable character leads him to a poignant pass on the troopship to the Trenches, and his wife, Mary, left behind with her child. Barney Mulhall, whose crippling seems to be only slightly worse than the drudgery it stopped. Father O'Connor, who is caught up in a moral dilemma that tears his naive mind apart and makes us wonder if that's what has already made Father Giffley turn to drink to stifle his own sobs. And of course, poor old Rashers Tierney who never had a chance from the day of his birth. A cruel world but indomitable spirits.

The fashion for dark realism seems to have permeated even Historical dramas. I suppose they think it underpins the characters with an Earthy veritas and makes them, and their circumstances, seem more real. It is true that the doings on the Cornish coast were pretty dreadful but to depict it in such uniformly depressing tones leaves no room for the light of moral comparison to shine in. It's as if the Human Condition is depicted as black paint on a black canvas. We're all doomed and there's no point in trying.

This is the stuff of Literature, we are tempted to think, but, unfortunately, this dark cynicism has not so much given it a Literary sheen but rather the ambiance of a bucket of mud from a marshy strand, full of ugly little creatures all trying to escape from their dire surroundings.

The trouble with being too realistic is that Reality is often dull, dour and boring and so to take this attitude when dramatising an Historical novel is really, to drain the romance, and thus the entertainment, from the history. Dickens and Shakespeare, and more recently Ripper Street, have a sort of parallel historical verity by the action being enhanced by beautiful dialogue and richly drawn characters. This dramatisation of Jamaica Inn, however, seems to have reduced Literary endeavours to incoherent grunts, curses and prosaic railings against the brutality of life.

I had to stop myself from wistfully hoping that the grim, marshy landscape would be transformed into the polished cobbles of Westward Ho and that the Inn would have a Shepperton makeover to turn it into a shiny Admiral Benbow complete with picturesque pirates and colourful redcoats but, unfortunately, we were stuck, until the final squalid thrashings, with undifferentiated mud and gloom. Our heroine was failed by the absence of the best traditions of female literary creations, and became, not so much a plucky young lass, but just another creature floundering in the mire of the marshes.

So when poor Mary Yellan rode off into the sunset with her mud-coloured horse-thief, we could only shrug with the dire certainty that she was merely riding slap-bang (with a guttural grunt)into the mud-encrusted side of the bucket.