STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
The true story of Jerome Rogers (Chance Perdomo), a young man barely out of his teens who landed an insecure, zero hour contract job as a courier on his moped, delivering blood packs between hospitals. In the CCTV camera ridden nightmare of London, he managed to rack up a series of parking fines that escalated out of control, and after using the assistance of pay-day loan companies and getting into trouble with bailiffs, was driven to take his own life.
According to large sections of the left leaning media, and even to numourous TV programmes high-lighting the problem, the scale of debt among younger people in the UK is at a pretty desperate stage, with many in precarious employment where in many cases, they are worse off than those out of work. Wages are not consistent with the cost of living (especially in the capital!) and it's making a decent lifestyle completely unsustainable. In the most extreme circumstances, it's now taking casualties, as this dramatization of one of the most extreme cases all too powerfully proves.
It's the central performance of Perdomo as the tragic Rogers that really serves as the driving force, an afflicted, hopeless young man, whose life was ripped apart by cameras working for a computerized court, where he can't be found guilty or innocent or have any sort of legal representation, just have big, soulless black machines issue him with fines he has no hope of paying. In his final scenes, he really comes alive, delivering a gut wrenching outburst of emotion that really stirs your gut.
While it delivers little in the way of humour or anything to feel positive or happy about, it's still a highly impressive and well worth seeing drama that shines a light on an accumulative problem in our society at the moment that really needs looking at. ****
