Southcliffe Part 1

Well advertised on almost all Channel 4 side shows, Southcliffe has promised to be up there with the great thriller dramas, leveling up to the brilliantly popular ITV Broadchurch and Luther, and many of us went into it expecting luminous characters, heart rendering story lines and ingenuous plot devices, all of them building up the grand finale of the second part. Unfortunately, this was not delivered.

Whilst the show does boast a variety of characters, from family man and news reporter David Whitehead (Rory Kinnear), to traumatic and grieving Christopher (Joe Dempsie), returning, alongside many others from Afghanistan, and they do play their parts well, the characters themselves all seem relatively 2 dimensional and a little bland. The Afghan traumas are a little overused in TV drama productions, and many of the PTSD portrayals are unoriginal and lacking in depth. The mental health side of the show seems unrealistic as well, with nearly everyone in the village of Southcliffe having some sort of traumatic past, or mental disorder. This makes for a disappointingly depressing viewing, in the way that we are shown no elements of happiness, and the few smiles on the show are increasingly fake.

Another problem I found with the programme is that it was very difficult to pick out a solid central story line, as from the beginning the focus is on so many different people at once, and all of them having quite different lives, the village being the only thing they share. We are, at first, led to believe that the focus is to be on burdening psychotic Stephen and his dementia-ridden grandmother,which then switches to the news reporter's supposed stalking of his ex-wife and child, and then back again to Chris' grief after losing his friend to severe injuries and his privately medicated shell shock.

This, however, is not the biggest disappointment. Whilst Sean Harris, playing ex-war veteran and now psychotic carer Stephen does play a haunting and desperately in need of help man, many of his interactions with the other characters in the show are missed due to a massive case of mumbling. I personally found that so many of his lines, which must have been so carefully written out by the show's writers were impossible to understand and therefore created a lot of confusion in regards to the events happening within the plot.

Meanwhile, the premise of the show; the actual shooting of the victims in the village, is only featured at the start of the the programme, in contrast to the other character's back stories. Therefore, overall, whilst the drama had large amounts of promise, it sadly did not reach it's full potential, and we can only hope that the next part of the series will be a little more fast paced, and a little more exciting than the first.