Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.
It was all to do with some sort of seedy drugs mess in the end - the men in burqas, Afghan refugees and home-grown terrorists having been red herrings, lending local colour, as it were, to the plot without really being that integral to it. The final episode had an anti-climactic air, even with baby Michael being snatched from the hospital by the hard-faced whore Maureen, love of miserable misogynist traindriver Pat’s life. My biggest question wasn’t why she had taken the child, but when she was going to feed it, because by my calculation the bairn hadn’t supped all day.
The hot-headed Jamal meanwhile got arrested at a Remembrance Day service, Laurie (Suranne Jones) was hobbling around with her ankle in plaster, feeling teary after the death of her lover Mal (David Morrissey), while her mother Susan and her new boyfriend Gerard decided to get married. Bernard Hill and the great Anne Reid should get their own spin-off sitcom out of this – a wry comedy of ageing disgracefully. By the same token, if Suranne Jones doesn’t now get inundated with policewoman roles, then my name is George Dixon – the name, as it happens, of the BBC’s Head of Scheduling, and the man who decided we needed another of these five-night dramas.
How many of these “drama events” can we take before the gimmick loses its lustre? I’m not sure that this second series of Five Days doesn’t start to take the shine off the format, and it has been interesting to follow the nightly drop-off in viewing figures. Six hundred thousand viewers apparently decided that they had something better to do with their time than re-engage with the drama after Monday night’s opening episode, but that still left a respectable 6.8 million following the story. Wednesday’s England football game on ITV1 pushed that down to six million, but 400,000 returned for Thursday’s episode. Those are decent numbers for what was a decent drama, but had I, through choice, been one of those die-hards, then this series would have definitely made me feel wary about making the same sort of commitment in the future.
The hot-headed Jamal meanwhile got arrested at a Remembrance Day service, Laurie (Suranne Jones) was hobbling around with her ankle in plaster, feeling teary after the death of her lover Mal (David Morrissey), while her mother Susan and her new boyfriend Gerard decided to get married. Bernard Hill and the great Anne Reid should get their own spin-off sitcom out of this – a wry comedy of ageing disgracefully. By the same token, if Suranne Jones doesn’t now get inundated with policewoman roles, then my name is George Dixon – the name, as it happens, of the BBC’s Head of Scheduling, and the man who decided we needed another of these five-night dramas.
How many of these “drama events” can we take before the gimmick loses its lustre? I’m not sure that this second series of Five Days doesn’t start to take the shine off the format, and it has been interesting to follow the nightly drop-off in viewing figures. Six hundred thousand viewers apparently decided that they had something better to do with their time than re-engage with the drama after Monday night’s opening episode, but that still left a respectable 6.8 million following the story. Wednesday’s England football game on ITV1 pushed that down to six million, but 400,000 returned for Thursday’s episode. Those are decent numbers for what was a decent drama, but had I, through choice, been one of those die-hards, then this series would have definitely made me feel wary about making the same sort of commitment in the future.
- Watch Five Days on BBC iPlayer
