Husskade

I wanted to love it. I'm one of those who actually likes this kind of thing and enjoy seeing people succeed. This could have been a really good variation on a theme of wannabe singers making good. But it just isn't. It misses. Put simply it's so fake...so extraordinarily and obviously faked. A lot of the singers involved are actually good. Many are probably as good if not better than the usual folks that audition for telly singing competitions. But the format and story arcs of the contestants are just bad and telegraphed from the beginning ...we have the snooty all singing, all dancing, I'm better than everyone one who vacillates between nice and nasty. There's a Harry Styles lookalike. The love story. The one who lets the side down and has to go. The one who won't dance. The 'band' who from the beginning are simply brilliant and the 'band' who sadly are not. The troubled band. The band you can't remember. And more. All the Instagram tropes are there. There's the established pop stars who look oddly somehow out of place and are trying just a bit too hard to be part of all this youth. And if I hear or see any more screaming or fake excitement jumping up and down .argh...it's too much and of course they all love each other and swear life long fealty on sight. I digress.

I think I know who should win but fear they won't and I will watch to the end just to see how the producers have decided to placate the pop charts. It is a fair rehash of a format that's familiar and it has been done before but I suspect Simon Cowell did it better. Enjoy ...

That's it....read the book.

Okay...a bit more. The BBC have messed and fiddled with the main characters to make them far less intriguing. They've changed names, nationalities and genders.. ..(eg Rose is actually called 'Wolf' William Fawkes..why mess with that? In fact as it goes on they've gutted it and is beginning to look like 'how to remove individuality from a dramatic character' . . Anyway....its a British crime procedural, the first one of three in a short series ...they are a bit grim in parts but if you like crime stories they're not bad...the books I mean.......read the book.

Actually as I'm watching I'm reminded of an episode of 'Travis' that was really awful..so much so I had to read the book to check that Lynda La Plante hadn't literally lost the plot. It wasn't her, she'd lost control of the televising of her stories....it was the production that had done it. They'd 'improved ' it so much it was almost unrecognisable . And this is looking exactly the same ...

Might be an idea for anyone who watches one of two of the many documentaries on YouTube about these men, their histories and it develops to what happened. And there you just will get a much closer approximation to the truth. Plus...you'll get a timeline and an understanding that will help sort out this muddle of a film. Fortunately I did do it that way and then came to this and while I knew what was going on I was still a bit confused. Got to add from the off I was completely distracted by Terry Stone and not in a good way...and the wig. Oh the wig. I'm not going to criticise the language...there's a lot of it putting it mildly so much it gets irritating ...and violence oh yes...it stereotypes 'hoodlums'. Someone has watched a lot of gangster films. But...it's an okay watch and passes a couple of hours. The truth is worth a look too.