The big Easter offering on ITV was Colditz. The BBC showed a famous version of Colditz in the seventies which featured many big name actors like David McCallum and Robert Wagner. It also featured a wonderful theme tune. So along come ITV with this new version with a new story. It starred Damian Lewis, of Band of Brothers fame, playing McGrade, a Scottish PoW escapee who makes it back to Britain, while his colleagues end up in Colditz castle. Cue lots of escape attempts, while the dastardly McGrade who's returned a hero, starts to fall in love with the girlfriend of one of his now interred colleagues. When it becomes obvious that she's not going to give him up, he tells her that her beau is dead. How nasty can you get?
The production has obviously had a bit of cash spent on it, and if some of the exteriors weren't actually filmed at the real castle, then it was a good stand in. Unfortunately, Lewis's character is just too dastardly and one-dimensional. There were some good characters in small roles including Timothy West's boffin, and the ever-stiff-upper-lipped James Fox. It'd have been nice if we saw more escapes since the majority seemed to fail, and yet we're told that others were getting out. And the Germans seemed to be terrible shots with a couple of sequences in which you can't believe they wouldn't have managed a hit - if a character must escape, then let him without have a sten gun from fifty yards miss him. but hit every tree within the vicinity.
Fairly mediocre overall then. The DVD might sell a few, but why they felt the need to release the soundtrack is beyond me.
As a side question, who are Power, the co-producers, with Granada, of this programme? They've also produced the recent TV version of Archangel based on Robert Harris's novel, and were also part of the group that made Russell T Davies' Casanova. Their website isn't very revealing.
Posted by adambowie at March 29, 2005 10:31 PM