Kiri

Hard hitting, grim with touches of humour.

Sarah Lancashire leaves the Happy Valley of Yorkshire for Gert Lush country, Bristol.

Lancashire plays a well meaning, compassionate and experienced social worker, Miriam. She needs to add a dash of the hard stuff on her morning cup of tea and has to bring the dog to work on account of all the ailments the dog has.

However her day is blown off course when she allows Kiri, a young black girl about to be adopted by her white parents visit to visit her real grandfather. To know where she comes from.

However Kiri fails to return home, believed to be abducted by her father. Now the blame lies on Miriam that she allowed an unsupervised visit to Kiri's grandparents.

Jack Throne has not written a whodunnit. This is about the fall out from a decision Miriam made, she is now going to be exposed to the press who already express that she went easy on her grandparents because they were black. Her bosses look like they will throw Miriam to the wolves and Miriam's life looks like it will spiral downwards in the following episodes.

Started out strong but then started dragging on in episode #3 out of 4. It could have been wrapped up in three episodes. A shame I liked the beggining a lot

There was much to like about this four-part series, but I'm afraid the last episode left me thinking the whole thing had run out of steam.

Brilliant performances by Sarah Lancashire as you might expect, and Stephen Mackintosh also showing his skill as a mature actor (I'm old enough to remember him when he was a schoolboy alongside Adrian Mole). The supporting cast also added weight to this tough drama.

I also loved the photography - in fact the atmosphere of the series was beautifully stylish, without it disappearing up its own backside.

However, I'll be honest and say I like my crime dramas to have decent endings, where the loose threads are neatly tied together and nothing is left in doubt. Everybody likes to see the culprit meet their comeuppance but this left one feeling the writer wasn't being clever in the way they drew the series to a conclusion, they were just being lazy.

The art of storytelling is really simple. A solid beginning, an exciting middle, with twists and turns along the way, and a brilliant ending, perhaps with some surprises. Certainly 9 out of 10 for the first two, but a disappointing 5 out of 10 for the finale.

On reflection, a few hours after I finished watching this fascinating unpredictable drama, I understand that if it were created by BBC, it would have been a completely different ending wrapped up with a pretty pink bow.

However Channel 4 have created this piece and it does well to represent some of the worst moral panic in our society through non bias and non bias eyes.

The care system and the role of social worker is not represented enough although watching this, you can see why the profession doesn't have flocks of people signing up to join.

The first episode was the best. I was hoping the pace would continue but it got slow and nothing much happened. Sarah Lancashire was the best part of this series. Worth it to watch her but otherwise not much going on. I give it a 4.