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The trouble with BBC2 drama is that it persists in going for style over substance. And while such tedious efforts as The Crimson Petal and the White and The Shadow Line tick all the boxes that BAFTA voters would want, they do little to encourage you to continue watching beyond the first episode. So it was perhaps a mercy that BBC2’s latest drama, The Night Watch, was a one-off, because, if nothing else could be said for it, at least you got to see the end without having to tune in again next week.
Adapted from Sarah Waters’ bestselling novel (though if you ever come across a TV adaptation of a non-bestseller, you will know that the world is about to end), The Night Watch follows the lives of Kay (Anna Maxwell Martin), Helen (Claire Foy) and Viv (Jodie Whittaker). The selling point of the drama is that it happens in reverse order, beginning in 1947, before travelling back to 1944 and 1941, delving further into the backgrounds of the characters, and revealing how the events of 1947 came about.
This should have been an interesting drama, and I do love the idea of telling the story in reverse. However, for it to have worked, the chronologically earlier scenes needed to contain some revelation, some twist, to make the audience see the 1947 scenes in a different light. Alas, we were given little more than mild surprises, with the rest mostly confirming what even Alice from The Vicar of Dibley could have deduced.
With every BBC2 drama comes the label ‘ambitious’. Somewhat shamefully, it seemed that the presence of lesbians was the thing that was getting The Night Watch this label. In 10 minutes, we’d had a considerable amount of hetero and homosexual activity, with a lesbian tryst and a fumble in a car that served little other purpose than to reiterate the jittery continuity announcer that (shock!) there may be some scenes of… of… a sexual nature. Unfortunately, sex does little to advance a plot, and The Night Watch did seem to flounder when it didn’t have one of its characters on top of another.
It’s also a shame that the acting royalty in the form of Martin, Foy and Whittaker couldn’t overcome problems with the script. Martin, as ever, was excellent, giving her second stand-out performance of the year after a fantastic turn in BBC1’s South Riding. However, the other two had little material to work with. Whittaker wasn’t on screen a great deal, and the only thing we really knew about her after 90 minutes was that she was having an affair, but the aforementioned fumble went a little way to giving that away. Foy also struggled, with her character being very poorly drawn. We were told that Helen was insecure yet, other than a couple of uncomfortable looks when Viv wanted to meet her “chap”, we didn’t really see any particularly concrete evidence of this; neither did it convince that she would leave Kay for a woman she hardly knew.
The Night Watch therefore felt like a waste of 90 minutes: going nowhere, and having nothing to say. While it was an undoubted success on a technical level, technical properties only form the icing of the cake, and when the sponge is a soggy, sinking mess such as this, the icing, no matter how good, just can’t cover that up.
"And while such tedious efforts as The Crimson Petal and the White and The Shadow Line tick all the boxes that BAFTA voters would want, they do little to encourage you to continue watching beyond the first episode."
Wow, really? I was hooked on The Crimson Petal and the White after ten minutes.
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