Finally caught up with the Red Riding trilogy this week:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_RidingI'd read the David Peace books before the TV series came out, and admired his ability to get beige on the page. They reminded me of James Ellroy's books set in Los Angeles but with the seedy glamour replaced with seedy grime. There wasn't so much an underbelly of vice, porn, and corruption more a Jimmy Two Bellies.
It's filled with actors that nitty gritty 'northern' programmes are, David Morrissey, Maxine Peake, Sean Bean, giving excellent performances but you sometimes ard not sure which of the programmes they are in.
The balance of based on a true story waves and wanders, again rather like Ellroy with the Yorkshire Ripper case being the Black Dahlia for Ellroy. The appearance of Joseph Mawle as Sutcliffe jolts the bounds of the fiction it does use apart.
Usually I don't mind flashbacks but in a series with episodes set in 3 different times, having flashbacks to the times of the earlier episodes in the last one is overused. If it was merely a diffetent view of previous scenes, you could see it working but it's huge chunks of plot. There's more of David Morrissey's scenes in the 1974 setting in the 1983 episode than in the 1974 one.
I haven't watched the recent Savile programne, and I didn't warch Tennant as Nilsen. I was recently looking at a hotel in Shoreditch where they have a vintage cinema and you get a cocktail, and thought about how that might be cool but the films didn't seem to fit with my vision. One was Se7en. I have had no desire to ever rewatch that.
Now a martini with The Thin Man...
