"World on Fire", BBC1
1 October 2019 12:07 amThis was so heavily trailed that I attempted to watch it last week, not realising that it was being advertised so far in advance ;-p
Thanks to the TV's appalling onscreen interface, I managed to miss half an hour of the first episode while patiently sitting and waiting for it supposedly to start, and found myself flung into the middle of a firefight between unknown foreigners in an unknown location with zero dialogue, just a lot of explosions: definitely not the most auspicious start. And while the publicity sold it as "Sean Bean plays a shell-shocked pacifist", in fact he got a couple of lines in the background as the father of one of the main characters -- luckily I wasn't watching it for Sean Bean :-p
But with all those disadvantages the story hooked me, just as the first series of "Sherlock" did under similar circumstances. By the end of the episode I'd worked out who everyone was and why, and cared what happened to them; the scene on the railway platform had every bit as much impact as the writers could have wished. I was definitely impressed.
Thanks to the TV's appalling onscreen interface, I managed to miss half an hour of the first episode while patiently sitting and waiting for it supposedly to start, and found myself flung into the middle of a firefight between unknown foreigners in an unknown location with zero dialogue, just a lot of explosions: definitely not the most auspicious start. And while the publicity sold it as "Sean Bean plays a shell-shocked pacifist", in fact he got a couple of lines in the background as the father of one of the main characters -- luckily I wasn't watching it for Sean Bean :-p
But with all those disadvantages the story hooked me, just as the first series of "Sherlock" did under similar circumstances. By the end of the episode I'd worked out who everyone was and why, and cared what happened to them; the scene on the railway platform had every bit as much impact as the writers could have wished. I was definitely impressed.