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I am absolutely blown away by this series.

I am afraid I am not.

*SPOILERS*











I loved it when I first saw it as a young, politically ignorant teenager: I thought it was funny and moving. But watching it now, it is largely just silly, often confused, and sometimes embarrassing. Yes, there are some funny, and some nice emotional moments. But the idea that hard left organisations, like the so-called Militant Tendency, would allow themselves to be manipulated by M15 agents provocateurs to carry out a campaign of racial violence is utterly absurd; for all the faults of those hard left organisations - and there are many - they're not *that* bad; to depict them in this way, even in a drama, is such an over-the-top exaggeration that it blunts any decent critical points which the series has to make.

What is more, Bleasdale doesn't know what to make of Murray. This is a man, in the Labour party, who supports minority causes, and is clearly steeped in the so-called political correctness of the 1980s left. And yet, he calls female teachers (members of his natural political constituency) "little girls", and mentally handicapped children "loonies". The only reason for this is so Bleasdale can show us what a bad man he is - or at least, what a bad man he is capable of being. It is very far from being a realistic characterisation.

The series hits its nadir in the ludicrous final episode, when Michael Palin's supremely irritating teacher delivers a fatuous "speech" to the assembled masses, just to spell out for us the message of the series - be tolerant, be open-minded, be decent - in case we hadn't twigged already. It's capped off with reaction shots of the various villans of the piece, as if to say to them "That's you told". It's even worse than the "decency speech" scene in the film The Bonfire of the Vanities; but for some reason, where that film, and that scene, were rightly trashed, GBH is still praised to the halt, and no one seems to criticise this ludicrous, didactic scene, which no self-respecting writer would have included. But I do not think Blesdale's writing, in this series at least, has much self-repect: it is pompous, preachy, and patronising.

Still, Robert Lindsay's quite good in this (if a bit Wolfie), Peter Hugo-Daly's great as Bubbles, and Lindsay Duncan is just amazing - so, it's not all bad. And the Doctor Who convention scence is a masterpiece of farce. If only the rest of the series had been as good.