It's difficult to know where to start with this very disappointing drama. Set in a beautiful rural village where millionaire business people and professionals in their grade I listed manor houses live but a well struck 5 iron from a sink estate full of drug addled benefit scroungers and ne'er-do-wells, it seems to be attempting to highlight cultural and social divides, unfairness and inequity in our society. Fair enough, reasonable basic idea.
The problem was that the story was, quite frankly, rubbish. Initially it looked like a small guy vs. nasty rich property developer yarn, but this never really materialised in any meaningful or interesting way. When the impassioned champion of said small guy, and always excellent, Rory Kinnear dies at the end of a rather slow scene setting first episode, a from-the-grave on-line ghostly presence appeared to be setting up episodes 2 and 3 to develop into a ghost story (it didn't), or a taut psychological drama (didn't do this either). Instead it meandered between low level soap opera story threads (which mostly led nowhere interesting), made trite, obvious, uninteresting social commentary on far too many topics to be impactful, and ended up as a tragi-drama with a completely random drowning crow-barred into the story to provide some sort of "conclusion".
Low points - Gambon and McKenzie and Richard Glover were cartoonishly "bad", Emilia Fox's character was totally peripheral. The final scenes when the young boy wanders off and is then effectively abducted, not 20 yards from his mother by a well meaning doctor, who never thought to look for, or shout out to, any parents before carting him off home, was just ridiculous.
High points - Abigail Lawrie and Rory Kinnear were excellent, Keeley Hawes pretty good. Rural town setting was very nice indeed.
8 out of 23 found this helpful.
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