A First Review

I thought I’d try and change up this blog a little and scatter some reviews of books, tv, movies, music etc throughout the entries. Starting Now!

 

Last week, I had the displeasure of watching a two part BBC drama called ‘Dive’, directed by Dominic Savage. Described as a contemporary love story about two teens growing up in modern day Britain, this show starts out with a girl, Lindsay going to train at the pool, with a view to joining the 2012 olympic team. On returning home, she discovers that her parent’s marriage is over, and not only has her dad moved out, but her mother has moved her new boyfriend in on the same day! Thus starts a sequence of events whereby Lindsay goes off the rails, ends up partying and having sex with one of the popular boys, Robert. Conveniently, another girl in the popular crowd does not like this and slashes Lindsay with a blade, thus leading Lindsay to the emergency room where she is suddenly changed from a closed down, sullen teen who barely says two words, to a more talkative person who tells the nurse that she has been bleeding and that she thinks she might be pregnant. Cut to the olympic team selection meet, where Lindsay finds out that she has made the team. Robert, in the meantime has said that he doesn’t do relationships, but makes a sudden turnaround when he finds out that she is pregnant. A tentative friendship and sexual relationship develops, with Robert then attending the first scan with Lindsay. The second part of the drama follows Robert as he tries to decide whether to be there for Lindsay or not. This scenario is complicated by Robert’s brother who appears to be clinically depresses, having returned from Iraq.

The storyline is patchy, with very little continuity, with the writer having tried to pack far too much into the two hours allocated the show. The ‘brother returning from Iraq’ storyline is a show all of it’s own, and serves little than to take time away from the main storyline.

The characters are poorly developed, with Lindsay’s character saying very few words. In fact, it is to Aisling Loftus’ credit that she was able to say so much while not actually speaking at all. Both characters seem to have moments of being one thing and then seem to immediately switch to something entirely different, which leads me to believe that the writer was writing a plot, and the characters were just a coincidence of trying to achieve the plot objective.

The only saving grace this drama has is the acting skill of the two main characters, which endear them to the audience. Without this I fear many people would have just tuned out.