Exile

We watched the three-part TV film, Exile, on DVD over the last couple of days. A seriously gloomy piece, but aided by a neat mystery that can only be solved if a man with Alzheimer's can be persuaded to reveal a secret. Improbable, I suspect, but the cast made it work.

John Simm plays a washed-out journalist who returns to his home town only to find that his father (Jim Broadbent) has developed Alzheimer's. His long-suffering sister (Olivia Colman) has been caring for the old man, and is at the end of her tether. She's not impressed to have her wastrel of a brother dragging her down further, and basically tells him to shape up or ship out.

He starts off badly but gradually picks up some of the slack, and then begins to try and find out why his father became so violently angry with him eighteen years before, an event that caused him to leave home. Alongside this, he starts an affair with his former best friend’s wife, causing ructions in a different area.

The film could have been very downbeat, but the casting is excellent, with the three leads at the top of their games, and there are enough twists and turns in the story to keep you guessing till the end.

Life on Mars

I hadn’t seen any episodes of the tv series, Life on Mars, before we left NZ. It was becoming quite a hit there by all accounts. Well, here in the UK they’re doing a repeat of it, so I saw the first episode last night – without ads, which was great. (I wonder how much editing they do to NZ versions of these series, when you consider that the program I saw was round about an hour anyway.)

John Simm has a very intense role as the man who may have gone back in time, may be in a coma, or may have just gone round the twist. Whatever the problem is, he plays the role very well, and elicits considerable sympathy from his audience in spite of his rather hard-nosed nature.

The seventies ‘look’ of everything is perhaps a little exaggerated. Were we really that overdressed and excessively hairy? I suppose it’s possible. And of course everyone smokes like a chimney, so the atmosphere indoors looks perpetually cloudy.

Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with some more of it, although it’s on quite late at night. Not that that’s worrying us much at the moment; we can sleep in as late as we like!