Reviews

It's intrinsically a gripping story and in this version this kicks in after a long, long time, when Scott and Flynn finally go on the boat trip. After that, the plot kept me watching. However - and it's a big however - the script is flat and the acting flatter. Andrew Scott barely moves a facial muscle throughout. Whatever makes Ripley of any interest to Greenleaf? He's a total bore. There is no sign even so much as lively conversation between them. Johnny Flynn is equally bland. He affects a semi-growling monotone. Playboy glamour? Next to none. As has been noted elsewhere, they are both far, far too old for their parts - in Scott's case by about 20 years! A 27-year-old actor might have prsented us with a "hungrier" and at least livelier Ripley. A very strange feature of the plot near the end is that the American detective correctly works out (guesses?) what's what and asks the key question (which I won't give away here) but promptly drops it. Why? It's not the only puzzling and convenient feature of the plot, but I won't say more.

I enjoyed this, partly, I think, because I'd never seen an Irish police thriller before. The main plot was gripping and well acted. I thought the ending was very well executed and certainly doesn't need to imply a second series, as some reviewers have said.

On the negative side, I found the family soap opera a bit tedious. The stories with the three children had nothing to do with the main plot. It's as if there were two competing programme ideas and someone had the not-so-bright idea of putting them both into one.

The English police scenes did not ring true at all and the histrionic outburst near the end was bizarre. Why was the superintendent (?) in charge of the case referred to as the "commissioner". It made no sense. The accents weren't always quite right either.

This is a top class serial.

The acting is excellent from everybody, even if Vicky McClure always seems a bit the same in everything she is in (i.e. Downbeat with always the same accent in whatever I've seen her in).

The story is believable, since the situation with the drug culture and the associated criminality is so prevalent in many parts of the country. Also convincing is the extreme youth of some of those who get emmeshed in it.

The plot had me totally gripped and the ending came as a surprise. Admittedly it was a bit far-fetched that Vicky McClure's character so quickly and easily became a fearless detective, but, hey, it's a thriller.

It's a truism that it's easier to start an interesting story than it is to finish it. I found this one gripping in the first couple of episodes. By episode 3 I was looking up how many more episodes there were left to go.

The story and the predicament of the lead character got more and more fraught, but it might have been hurried along, in my opinion.

In episode 5, not surprisingly it all reaches a crescendo - but then rather lamely, too smoothly and quickly comes to the conclusion.

I think it's almost a rule now that TV drama serials have one or two episodes too many. I presume it's somehow cheaper to spin out one series out than to generate two.

There are some clichés, for example those TV drama disputes where characters have an argument lasting one minute, which ends when one of them simply leaves the room.

I sort of enjoyed this, even though it was a bit like eating too much sugary food. I know it's difficult making a film when the real people are still alive, but surely the reverential sentimentality doesn't have to be laid on this thick. The local people are saintly and are pitted against made-up evil scheming bankers.

The true story behind the film is great, but quite complex. It's easy to read up on, e.g. Channel 4 did a good documentary a few years ago. This film doesn't worry too much about niceties like facts. In reality the bank had to be called "Bank ON Dave", because it was not approved as a fully-fledged bank and to this day is called Burnley Savings and Loans. The film throws in a fictitious rock concert and a rather half-hearted rom com subplot. Roy Kinnear is excellent. Joel Fry is good, too, but he's great at comedy (see him in Yesterday) and I think he could have acted a bit bigger here. Perhaps the director didn't let him.

Bertie Carvel doesn't seem to be doing much at all in the first story (the first two episodes of the six). He has to get a bit more demonstrative later, especially in the second one. The character of Dalgliesh is indeed glum, taciturn, lugubrious - that is how P D James created it. Sadly this doesn't tend to make for entertaining viewing, as it is difficult to identify with a hero who shows so little warmth and doesn't try to be likable. My mind went back to the1990s Dalgliesh series with Roy Marsden and I re-watched him in the first episode of Devices and Desires, available on YouTube. In my opinion Marsden does a better job. He is also taciturn, etc, etc, as per the job description, but through it all he conveys a greater sense of Dalgliesh's underlying humanity. There is just a hint of lightness and warmth in his portrayal, which we don't get here. Bertie Carvel's Dalgliesh is fair, concerned for justice, even indulgent (excessively so towards Jeremy Irvine's character ) - but he's glum, he's grim and he's grey.

This has an interesting premise and starts well. But, as so often, a good premise is not enough. There are far too many flashbacks, many or most of which could have been cut with no loss to the story. But there were three episodes to fill and I expect those repetitive scenes with the two children were quite cheap. The plot is unconvincing to put it mildly. It is one of those where a leading character continually fails to do an obvious action, thus prolonging the story to fill its allotted hours. I can't say more without introducing spoilers. And what about the control room? Isn't the ambulance service very busy? Erm, not in this case. The working hours seem extremely flexible, too. The one saving grace of the show is the acting of Iain de Caestecker. He does a good job as a well-meaning man going through extreme stress.

Nowadays TV drama is mostly the same as cinema drama, just with a smaller budget, and apart from news and current affairs, TV stations just play pre-recorded items. How different it was when this series was made. I'm not sure if the programmes went out live, but even if they didn't, they were made "as if" live, since editing early video tape was extremely difficult and expensive. So what you get with these shows is similar to what you get when you go to a live theatre performance: a company of actors working together in real time to present a story. Fabulous! And, yes, there are going to be the odd little errors, just as in the theatre. The only difference from live theatre is that, in this series, we have the addition of wonderfully evocative filmed sequences made in Paris in an era when it looked extremely Parisian. It's exciting. I don't mind at all about the small and rather cheap sets.

This is terrific - you get a good filmed version of the whole show (in its revised - but certainly not improved - form of 2014) and also a moving reunion of the original 1989 cast. Lea Salonga and Simon Bowman, the first Kim and Chris, sing The Last Night of the World, showing up the inferiority of the performance earlier in the evening. Alistair Brammer in particular cannot compare with Simon Bowman. Brammer's voice has a kind of whiny drone in it. Probably no one has ever surpassed Bowman on tenderness in the love duets of the show (see the videos on Youtube of him and Lea performing them when the show was new). He seems actually to have improved his voice since then, losing the (IMO) excessive vibrato. The new Kim is good, but Lea Salonga is impossible to beat. Her excellent voice has become richer and more mature over the years, less suitable for the role of teenage Kim, but that's not a criticism.

This was once quite a high-grade series, but what's happened?

I thought something might be amiss when I noticed early on a tiny thing: a totally anachronistic payphone. Very odd, when the rest of the set-dressing is meticulous. But that was nothing. The footballing was appalling. Production values close to zero. There was fog and floodlights shining into the camera to try to hide the fact that there were only about half a dozen players and hardly any spectators. The "stadium" was a sort of down-at-heel little amateur affair field suitable for perhaps a Sunday league. These were supposed to be sixth-round FA Cup matches with a player so famous that he is featured on This is Your Life and has a flashy lifestyle. Also there's some terrible hammy acting and the plot is a run-of-the-mill Morse-Lewis-Endeavour one with no redeeming features. I could go on.

I have never liked the words "Based on a true story". Either give us a story as true as can be, or just give us a story. Here it's a bit like the Railway Children - exciting incidents at intervals. Realising that archeology might seem dull, it was decided there should be a couple of dramatic accidents and a love affair, neatly spaced through the running time. If only they could really have devoted themselves to transmitting the fascination of the archeology involved. It would have been a big challenge, but great if it had come off. (By the way, it's weird that we are not properly shown the treasure - not even in the end credits.) Instead we have a hefty dose of the dreamy "last summer before war" trope, admittedly with the odd downpour. I'm getting round to saying it's a bit boring. The actors: Carey Mulligan is too young, but otherwise wonderful (as is the boy playing her son). Ralph Fiennes is excellent. Lily James is wearing oversized modern designer glasses, lest we forget that she's a beautiful young actress of the 21st century. Johnny Flynn is too old, but gets away with it and really inhabits the period, especially in his manner of speech.

This spoof of The Killing and The Bridge (along with a few other references) is good in parts. There are some funny moments, but there aren't enough of them for so many episodes. We get the basic joke in episode one. With satire, less is more. It should have been nore more than half the length. Also, bringing in an English policeman is out of place in Scandi Noir. The references to Midsomer Murders and Inspector Morse are dull, Adam Godley fails to evoke those detectives anyway and is boring in the part. The Bill Wall character is an unfunny flop, too. It's a bit cheap: the scenes in St Ives are all too obviously filmed in Sweden and the car is left-hand drive.

It's OK and has its strengths. It starts off well. The parts before Alex gets into his stride as an agent are by far the best. Every scene with Brenock O'Connor in is excellent - he steals the show, which is a big achievement because he had only a hackneyed stock character ("hero's cheery friend") to work with. Otto Farrant does a workmanlike job and is best in those early scenes, but he has insufficient charisma to carry the series. It's a tough role: once Alex becomes action man all nuance has gone and this version does nothing to make him more interesting. They've even taken away his gimmicky toys. When he gets his makeover to become Alex Friend, it's built up as an event, but in reality he just gets a slightly shorter haircut. There is no attempt to make him seem a bad boy who might need to be sent to a reformatory. In fact the Point Blanc school nearly kills the whole thing. It's a boring place, visually and in every way. It's lifeless and the scenes there go on too long. The tiny number of other students there are dull even before anything happens to them. James (the one who looks like Snape) sometimes has an Australian accent, but that's just about his only interesting feature. The plot collapses during the Point Blanc scenes (vast holes open up, which I won't go into). Almost all the adult roles are cardboard characters and the biggest names in the cast are playing them. It might all improve if there are future series, but Otto Farrant is already well over age for the role of a schoolboy, so I don't know how that would work.

Excellent acting was what made this series, as well as the very interesting content and insight into the situation of Israel and its Arab neighbours. The guy playing Uri was brilliant - mulit-faceted and totally believable. I see he won an award. It was well deserved. Amiel may have overdone the inscrutability, though. It's true that it's slow and it's also true that it goes a bit silly during the action sequences towards the end - but wonderful nonetheless. (Homeland, in comparison, was superficial and too much based on tricks and annoying over-emoting.)

Jonah H-K... how does he get parts? Here he is, playing an extremely similar role to the one he had in World on Fire, i.e. a wet young upper-class Englishman in the 1920s-1940s. In neither role does he have a feeling for the period or an appropriate accent. Even if he were better, the script would still be anachronistic anyway. And Agatha herself is boring. It's also very slow. After a while I gave up and switched off.

Judging from the first episode, the Second World War is all about a young man torn between two girlfriends. Yes, right. Jonah Hauer-King plays that young man, but does not embody the demeanour or, especially, the mode of speech of the time. He speaks a student's London dialect of today, replete with glottal stops. A few moments viewing of any British film made in the 30s would have provided suitable models. It's not the only anachronism. Helen Hunt, playing the American journalist, presumably stipulated in her contract that she would not wear anything close to 1930s' makeup, hairstyle or clothing. (In fact she looks oddly like Penelope Keith in her prime.) She sends a radio report from Berlin back to the States, but afterwards asks her German neighbour if she heard the broadcast. I'm still wondering how that was supposed to have functioned. Perhaps it worked like the 1930s phone system, using which Jonah HK is able to chat to his mother on a crystal clear line from Poland back to England, just as war has broken out in September 1939. I'm almost surprised the script didn't have him using an iPhone for the purpose. This is sloppy stuff.

Judy Dench hardly need be in this - the present day stuff could easily be cut without much loss. The ending with her lawyer son is cringeworthy. What should be key aspects of the story, i.e. Joan's motivation, the political background, the dangers she ran in spying - are given superficial treatment in order to make room for a very conventional love story about Joan and her boyfriends. The scientific aspects are treated in a childish manner. ("You might try a centrifuge," says Joan. "Say that bit again!" says Max). The newsreels and radio reports are horribly phony. "Mr Truman says a second atom bomb has been dropped on Nagasaki. 74,000 people were killed." Umm, how could anyone know at that moment how many had been killed? I could go on, but I won't, because there's an elephant in the room that needs to be mentioned and it's Tom Hughes' laughable performance as Leo. "Act like everyone's clichéd notion of a hot-headed young Russian revolutionary, Tom!" Trevor Nunn seems to have said to him, though it's hard to believe. "That's good, Tom, but ramp up the pantomime foreign accent and give us all a good laugh!"

Mr P has toned down his usual artificiality, created a time and place that more or less convinces and put together an exciting plot with a real dénouement. He deserves kudos for managing all this after many years of not doing so. Perhaps all the BBC money they have thrown in his direction has started to pay off at last. Toby Stephens is excellent, as is Keeley Hawes (as usual). Everyone else is good too and little Toby Woolf is a delight. There are faults. Yes, there is a coherent dénouement but it's not without clichés (one particularly egregious one involving guns) and some sickly sweetness. Adrian Edmondson's TV shows are embarrassingly unfunny. The subplots, while interesting, are in fact superfluous. There is the one about the missing son, which is included, I guess,to give Keeley Hawes and Clare Bloom things to do. The daughter's daft scenes at Buckingham Palace and the expensive ball with hordes of debs are also of only tangential relevance.

The best bit for me, as a linguist, was the fact that some of it was in Welsh (not that I know any) and it reminded me a bit of the Scandi series it was emulating. However it went on for far too many episodes. After about half way it could have been wound up quickly at any point. I lost track and interest in the council estate plot, which could have been left out in my opinion. There was also recourse to daft police incompetence to help protract matters.

One of the best things about this film is that it perfectly captures the "style" and the feel of (part of the) life in the north of England. It has its defects, though. Others have noted the perhaps overdone emphasis on drugs. It all gets a bit too highly coloured for the sake of drama. The film needed more of the positive sides of the culture: the music and the dancing. The main defect, though, is that the main character, John, is a bit dull, played by an actor who is about ten years too old for the part - and often looks every minute of it - and whose accent is not 100% convincing. His mate, Matt, is much better.

I expected to love this. But I didn't. I'm no expert, but even I could see a lot of obvious faults. I'm not just talking about things like modern buildings (which are very evident), but the lack of atmosphere. At the start of the film, the beach is crowded, quite rightly - but after that, it's pretty empty when we see it. Where are the heaps of ruined vehicles, etc? All dead bodies are completely intact. There's no blood at all. The Germans are never called the Germans ("the enemy"). How are we supposed to believe that over 300,000 got back to England? Apart from the near empty beaches, we almost only see people NOT making it home. As for the "little ships", apart from the Mark Rylance one, thirty or so of them arrive all together as a neat flotilla to cheer up Kenneth Branagh. And how long does a Spitfire take to come down after it runs out of fuel?

This is a great series. OK, the medical stuff isn't in the least bit realistic and the developments happen much too quickly - but, hey, it's a thriller. It rattles along and it's thrilling.

Best of all, though, is the fact that there are such good characters and such good acting. A standout is Pal Sverre Hagen, who is excellent as the very unusual Leif. The comic relief from the disaster-prone Teo, also very well acted, really made me laugh.