paul2001sw-1

The great Sally Wainwright, writer of 'Happy Valley', is back with 'Riot Women', and has a recruited a stellar cast to play a gang of middle-aged women refusing to be pigeon-holed and forming a punk band. Their performances are all good, and as you'd expect with Wainwright, the script is sharp, funny, and often grimly pereceptive. Where it doesn't quite match her best work is the set up, which is a little laboured, and a sexual politics that overstates its case - the stories of men behaving badly are all individually plausible but collectively the point is hammered home a little harder than neccessary. On the plus side, the band is surprisingly good.

There's a lot to like in 'Trespasses', a drama set in Northern Ireland of the 1970s: good acting, and a tough but believable story about love and hate across the sectarian divide. In spite of the appearance of Gillian Anderson in the cast, the budget was obviously low, but everything is put together skilfully. There are also weaknesses: a tendency to show everything in that time and place as relentlessly grim, and a story that doesn't quite go anywhere in the end. One reason for this is that the troubles break over the head of the central character, but she herself has no personal investment in them; it's thus fundamentally a story about the madness of others. I still liked it; but other stories have moved me more.