Review of The Way

I've been watching TV for 55+ years and I can safely say that this was one of the worst drama series I have ever seen. The plot was preposterous - there's no other word for it, I'm afraid. The dialogue was absolutely ram-packed full of clichés, and repetitive, and boring, and there are endless family screaming matches that lead nowhere. The scriptwriters' sense of geography is seriously lacking (Cheltenham to Sussex/Kent by canal boat and on foot IN A DAY? - do me a favour). It paints the English as a bunch of smug, brutish, spouse-swapping toffs. What's more it portrays the Welsh as either bolshy, hysterical (old sense), mawkish, history-obsessed, or all of the above. It posits that there's some kind of ongoing 'war' between the English and the Welsh - which there isn't - and that the two nations are as different as, say, Zulus and Cherokees - which they aren't. It contains a villain ('the Welsh Catcher' - I'm not making this up) who isn't just 'modelled on' the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - he's a direct plagiarism: he even has a truck with a big cage on the back. (I repeat: I'm not making this up.) Well, I could go on and on and on, but I won't. I'll just finish by saying that half an hour before it was due to end, when the 'refugee' family were just about to 'make the perilous crossing to France in a small boat' to escape ... erm ... whatever it was they were fleeing from - at that point I turned to my partner and said, "Do you know what I wish for? - I genuinely hope that their boat capsizes and every single one of them drowns." (Yes, I know that wasn't very nice of me, but hey, they were just atrocious fictional characters.) Sadly only one of them drowned, in one of the most idiotic and melodramatic suicides ever put to film.*

*And then, to cap it all, (and I repeat it again: I'm NOT making this up) his corpse washes up THE VERY NEXT DAY on THE VERY SAME BEACH he set out from.