I haven't exactly been overwhelmed by the Christmas fare this year, but this quite tickled me. Starring John Gordon Sinclair and Alan Davies, it was a fairly whimsical story set against a walk along the ancient Roman Road running from Chichester to London - Stane Street.
The story really isn't worth going into in enormous detail, since it turns out to be about something personal yet trivial in the scheme of things, but it was well made and well acted. I fear that the denizens of the Sussex/Surrey borders may be a little unhappy at the Straw Dogs/American Werewolf in London behaviour of their pub regulars. I'd suggest that most of the people living in those villages work in the City and don't support their local landowning, right-of-way blocking evil farmer.
And I guess that I'm probably the only person watching who was concerned about how Alan Davies' character was going to get his bike back from Brighton where he left it at the start of the story.
One final thing to say about this was that it ran to an unusual length for an ITV drama - 1 hour 45 minutes including ads. Good to see that not everything has to fit an exact mould (although ITV can hack some of their longer dramas down to size as they need to - I'm reliably informed that a recent Midsomer Murders managed to shed half an hour for its repeat. That's got to be a whole subplot!)
Posted by adambowie at January 1, 2005 02:55 PM