Five Days was broadcast over a two-week period on BBC1, not over, say, five days, which might have seemed the sensible way to schedule it.
Still at the end of the first and second episodes, we had a plaintive appeal from the BBC1 continuity announcer asking us to set our digital video recorders to record the whole series to ensure we didn't miss an episode. Obviously they really meant "Sky+" but the BBC being the BBC, they couldn't mention it. The fact that there's no other system currently out there that can do this without you providing at least some details about when the programme's on, doesn't really come into it.
Anyway, I did "Sky+" the entire series and very good it was too. The cast was excellent as we dipped into an ongoing case that began with the disappearance of first a young mother and then, separately, her two children at the start of day one. We returned on day three of the investigation with a full head of steam behind things, and then again at day twenty-eight, day thirty-four and day seventy-nine.
Along the way, a top-notch cast takes us through events with plot details unfolding in a not-terribly spectacular, but utterly convincing manner. I was completely hooked and loved Hugh Bonneville's almost diffident detective. We don't often see TV crime stories played out over such a protracted length of time, with cases either being solved in days, or perhaps being reopened from times gone by. What we were able to observe in this series was the devastating impact of the dissapearances and perhaps murders, on the extended family.
Posted by adambowie at February 7, 2007 4:06 PM