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MovieMail's Review
Usually when long series get to DVD I like to watch them in clumps of 3 episodes. GBH is too intense for this. Bleasdale’s 1991 Dickensian epic, its 7 episodes totalling 9 1/2 hours was inspired by 1980s British politics with an uncaring Conservative government confronted by an introverted Labour party battling the enemy within – an equally uncaring radical militant tendency.
With GBH, Bleasdale is on his familiar ground of people versus the system, and he’s always more interested in the underdog than the process. He’s interested in the politics but he clearly likes actors and loves to give them something fun to do. Sometimes he can give them too much space but in GBH the balance is perfect. As Michael Murray, a damaged human becoming leader of a major metropolitan council, Robert Lindsay is a nasty, petty little man bent on revenge for all the real and imagined slights he ever took. It’s a great technical achievement of writing and acting that he still engages our empathy as the series grows. But Michael Palin’s Jim Nelson, the special school headmaster who thwarts Murray almost by accident, is a bundle of principles, bravery and neuroses, especially neuroses, that produces one of the all-time great characters. I defy anyone not to care about him or have an overwhelming need to protect and cuddle him.
Melissa is Bleasdale’s affectionate reworking of the 1960s Paul Temple mystery starring Jennifer Ehle. Jake’s Progress is the uncomfortable story of a genuinely nasty little boy, a treat for those of us fed up with up with too many cute children on TV.
