fri 22/11/2024

Five Days, BBC One | reviews, news & interviews

Five Days, BBC One

Five Days, BBC One

Tired conclusion to week-long event drama

Flags of our Fathers? It's day five in Five DaysJohn Rogers
Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.
Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.

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We found "Five Days" very hard to follow with various odd people popping up with little or no explanation as to who they were and what relationship one had to the other. A lot of the dialogue was indistinct and there was too much mumbling by the actors even allowing for all the accents. Who was looking after the baby at the end when it was snatched? There was a lot of coming and going with th poor child. Frankly, this was a lot of propaganda to portray the virtues of "inclusion" which insulted our intelligence. How many Moslems have you seen wearing poppies?!

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