If you heard a rumour that this 5-part Channel 5 production was a sharply-written, well-directed and brilliantly acted contemporary thriller, well, you didn't hear it from me. On the contrary, I found it to be so much sensationalist, far-fetched nonsense full of clichéd characters and situations, to the point that the only praise I could bestow on the cast was their not breaking out into laughter as the script lurched ever further into silliness.
If the programme was adapted from a recent novel as the credits indicate, I can only assume it's one of those books you pick up for free from the exchange-shelf at your local supermarket as I'd hate to have paid money for it, no matter how little.
The plot is the latest to derive from the awful Jamie Bulger case, where an innocent young toddler was brutally murdered by two eleven-year-old boys, who were later released back into society with new identities for their own protection. The offender for the purposes of this story, was a young girl called Sally McGowan who some 30 or 40 years ago, at around the same age as the Bulger murderers, barbarically stabbed an infant boy to death. The drama here kicks off when Rachel Shenton's young mother Joanna escapes her failing marriage by coming to the small town of Flitfield where her mother, Joanne Whalley has settled years before. Highly protective of her primary-school age son Alfie, Joanna has emotional baggage of her own, going back to a troubled childhood where she has a recurring nightmare of setting a doll on fire in her own bedroom as a little girl. Anyway, she gets a job at the local estate-agent, managed by the wimpiest, least-likely looking lothario you'll ever see, although you can at least understand his motivation to get out from under his scurrilous, domineering wife. Reading up the local news on-line to see what's happening, she picks up on a stray thread which claims that one of the townsfolk is the killer McGowan, now grown into middle-age and living in anonymity amongst them. Seeking to ingratiate herself into the clique of young mothers, she lightly passes on this titbit of gossip which naturally takes flight almost immediately and becomes the talk of the town.
It is, of course, particularly bad news for any middle-aged women-around-town who have ever harboured secrets in their past, (which is pretty much all of them!), especially when it seems someone is now trying to kill them off one-by-one. And so it goes, with Joanna playing the blundering amateur detective, handily identifying one new suspect after another for the killer who's obviously got links to McGowan's young victim years ago, before the two big reveals at the end of firstly the real McGowan, (who should really have been called McCoy!), which isn't too difficult to suss as she's the only untainted granny-type left standing and secondly the unhinged present-day relative out to revenge the young boy's death from years ago. Naturally, Joanna is in the thick of it at the climax, which of course has to involve a really big fire, the better to help her come out the other end duly purged with all her bad childhood memories literally burned away.
Honestly, I wish I had a match to set light to the script of this ridiculously contrived hogwash which had more connecting parts than a Meccano set. The acting too was routinely bad by all the participants, but especially by Shenton, in particular her big emotional scene with her mum, which will send you running behind the sofa more than any of the supposed cliff-hanging scenes elsewhere in the narrative.
The fact is, I'm afraid, that in the end, this latest Channel 5 drama just isn't worth talking about.
