The Moorside

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

A dramatisation of the real life tale of Shannon Matthews, a nine year old girl from the Dewsbury area of Yorkshire, who went missing for a short while in early 2008, and sparked a nationwide appeal for her safe return (but received substantially less coverage than Madeleine McCann, from a more affluent background...but who's never been found.) Julie Bushby (Sheridan Smith), a close friend of Shannon's wayward mother Karen (Gemma Whelan), spearheaded the local community into action, and all the local residents turned out to look for Shannon in a unified show of solidarity, while Karen's behaviour was just disinterested and odd. Eventually, in what appeared to be a rare happy ending for this type of case, Shannon was found...but the truth, in it's own way, was as earth shattering as if she hadn't, when it was discovered Shannon had been abducted by her own mother and her friend Michael Donavan (Sam Chapman), while her current partner Craig Meehan (Tom Hansen) was arrested for possessing child pornography.

There are many who subscribe to the mediums of film and television, strictly as a means of escapism, to retreat into a world of fantasy, with limitless possibilities and an almost certainly predetermined happy ending. There is not much interest, from these people, in seeing re-enactments of tales constrained by the boundaries of real life, even happy tales, played out with all the grubby, unavoidable trappings of reality. A tale set somewhere like Dewsbury Moor, a place that perfectly encapsulates the gritty, unglamorous surroundings/way of life that are probably the norm for a no doubt many unidentified number among us. In bringing this dramatisation to the screen. director Paul Whittington has shoved this bleak landscape straight in our face and left us to witness the car crash that proceeded.

In what appears to be the most meagre common ground with a fantasy film as opposed to the hard, brutal depiction of reality that it is, the lead character is the good guy, or certainly the person with the most noble intentions, even at the expense of not really being the main antagonist of the story. In this role, as the bright, bubbly spark of flickering decency in a sea of relentlessly, depressingly immoral, grubby people, Sheridan Smith truly exemplifies what a terrific actress she is, demonstrating her ability to transform and really immerse herself into any role she's doing, and really bringing the character of Julie Bushby to life like no other. The supporting performers are also strikingly accurate, but it is truly her who steals the show.

The dichotomy of Matthews is simply as a figure who took dysfunctional to a whole new level, who skipped her appearance on The Jeremy Kyle Show and gained public notoriety in a different, far more shocking way. The Daily Mail/Tory Party would probably have you believe she's symptomatic of hundreds of others across the country, and while that's most likely very debatable, this is still a well made and hauntingly accurate portrayal, spread out over two series, of a case that'll probably never be forgotten. *****

It's interesting. Different. More a character study than a crime thriller. What price friendship? Very good performances. Realistic family and community situations. Recommended.

The Moorside tells the story of the staged abduction of Shannon Matthews from the viewpoint of Julie Bushby, the person who led the community effort to find the 9 year old Dewsbury schoolgirl. As she tells the press: 'When chips are down and one of us has a problem, we are all there to help, we stand shoulder to shoulder with one another, we will never give up hope'

The rallying cry felt hollow in this docudrama as we knew Shannon's mother was involved in this bizarre abduction. Even when Shannon went missing, there was an outcry that people living in council estates did not merit the sensitive media attention that the parents of Madeline McCann had got a year earlier.

The first episode focuses on Karen Matthews and her dysfunctional family. She had children from several men, her present partner seems to be more interested in surfing the internet. Some of the other relatives crave the media attention. Karen herself comes across as dimwitted and maybe even manipulative as well. Suspicions are aroused early when she starts dancing to a ringtone of a mobile phone.

By the end of the first episode, Shannon is found under the bed of Karen's boyfriend's uncle. A cack-handed stunt to get money from the media it seems.

In the second episode the police now turn their attention towards Karen. Her friends and neighbours who rallied for her now have doubts about her story. The community now vilify Karen Matthews but Julie Bushby saw her as weak, a symptom of a broken Britain where too many women from an early age were let down by men. In the drama Julie and one of Karen's neighbour talk about how both were sexually abused as youngsters.

The drama was strongly acted by the leads, Gemma Whelan, Sian Brooke and Sheridan Smith but I felt it still lacked freshness, too much about it that delved on 'council house scum.' I can imagine that wounds are still raw in parts of Dewsbury and although we do not see the character of Shannon, I could not help thinking that this drama did not do her much good given she is now 18 years old.

The standout performance here is Gemma Whelan's -- very real, memorably so, and, if you'll forgive the cliché, brave. (Reminded me of Lorraine Stanley, similarly brilliant in "London to Brighton.") I'm always impressed when an actress who, on the evidence of photos, normally looks clever and pretty can play a character as fat, dumb, weak, and unattractive as Shannon Matthews (and can make her genuinely interesting).

Among the remarkably unappealing folk of Moorside (coarse, creepy, loutish-looking men, pulpy obese women, all speaking in almost unintelligible Yorkshire accents), the neighbor played by Siân Brooke, relatively slim, soft-spoken, and beautiful, stuck out like another species. I admit to finding her the most sympathetic character in the drama.

However, the story's heroine is clearly supposed to be Julie Bushby, the self-appointed community leader, played by Sheridan Smith. She struck me as somewhat obnoxious and self-important in the first episode, and I was pleased to see her taken down a peg, if only briefly, in the second.

The way she rallied the neighborhood on behalf of the missing girl seemed useless and rather ridiculous -- parades, candlelight vigils, singalongs, etc. -- but maybe the Moorsiders actually went in for such virtue-signaling stunts. At one point episode 2 actually has them singing Kumbaya.

This drama was marred, for me, by a few scenes of horribly contrived preachiness and exposition, especially one in which Brooke and Smith discuss pedophilia. The dialogue seemed totally fake. (It was also marred, in places, by sloppy editing, such as a scene between four women in a car that focuses so disproportionately on three of them that you wonder if the fourth, played by the ubiquitous Siobhan Finneran, is even in the car with them.)

The biggest surprise, for me, was how pleasant, or at least not shabby and ugly, the Moorside council estate is. While the individual houses are crowded together, as in any development, they look, at least on the outside, fairly attractive -- quite a contrast to the multilevel council flats one sees in many movies.

I've only seen the first episode but I can be confident that my rating isn't going to change and neither will my opinion of this program.

Firstly, don't watch it if you think you're going to find out anything you didn't already know from TV and newspaper reports. Don't watch it if you want to see sweeping camera shots of Dewsbury and the surrounding countryside. It wasn't filmed there.

You'll watch this because it was written by Neil Mckay who has written some great TV in the past. He's written TV shows about the Moors Murderers and Fred & Rose West. You have to remember that when shows like this are written there will be some added drama that didn't actually happen so as to sex up the show.

The problem with this show is that it's impossible to sex up so there's lots of dialogue showing the "can-do" attitude of the residents of The Moorside estate. Whether much of it actually happened is questionable, however, the actresses did spend time with their real-life counterparts so there will be some true to life scenes and dialogue.

For me, it was exactly what I expected from a show on this subject.