Blackout

There have been many fine political dramas made by the BBC over the years; Christopher Eccleston was famously in one of the best ('Our Friends in the North'); but sadly, 'Blackout' is not destined to join them. Set in an un-named city, all the details of which are deliberately vague, 'Blackout' features a complex plot relayed almost entirely in outline: we see characters talking about events after they have happened, sometimes show to us in flashback (or even premonition) but almost never directly relayed. The writer may be trying to be clever here, but the real power of visual drama is the ability to portray the seat-of-the-pants feeling of something as it's actually happening: this has all the emotional pull of a script meeting. And the conspiracy-based plot is in a pertinent area for modern Britain, but is actually less shocking than the truth (that the sort of developments it portrays are happening on their own, without any need for murder and blackmail). Sometimes, the devil is in the detail; for a drama to work, one has to believe in the life of the people it portrays.