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Roadkill - not something to take home and cook

 I hate not finishing a book. No matter how much I am not enjoying it, or how badly written it is, I feel personally defeated when I set it aside and take it to the Oxfam shop.

At my advanced age, I feel this less keenly and am more ready to blame the book than my own ability to read (tolerate) it.

The various travel restrictions with virtually enforced iPlayer, Netflix and Prime watching, have led me to apply this principle to films and television shows. Unfortunately, the list of these that I have never finished viewing grows daily - to the extent that I am cancelling Netflix as soon as I finish watching Midnight Diner.

The latest casualty is David Hare's Roadkill (BBC iPlayer). 

Great cast, high production values, dramatic filming and editing  - and dull, boring, grim and pointless script.

I made it through one and a half episodes. If it's not good by then, it's never going to be.

I was anticipating an elegant, witty script such as Hare had done in the Worricker trilogy a few years back. That featured an interesting moral dilemma, some good political principles, a great cast and stylish direction. It also had a few characters with a still-functioning moral compass.

Alas, the characters in Roadkill never appeared to have owned any moral compass. Every character you latch onto with a hope of displaying a modicum of ordinary human integrity will, all of a sudden, take a bribe, sleep with the boss, pass out from drugs or sell out a friend. I am not looking for Joan of Arc or Thomas More, just someone who isn't completely driven by money, power or sex.

As one who has written nine novels without a single villain, I know it's possible to have a good story without an army of duplicitous characters. Pick any one of them in Roadkill and they will let you down before the end of the episode (well, at least episode one, but episode two was headed that way).

How did this nonsense reach our screens for four episodes? Good question. Ultimately Roadkill is a lazy House of Cards wannabe. It's cliché-ridden, unengaging, disappointing and predictable. The arc of the story is easy to detect in episode one and gives enough foreshadowing to warn the viewer that nothing good is apt to happen in any of the following instalments.

The four films of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time are still available on the Channel 4 website. They offer seven hours of entertaining and witty social observation as well as a good picture of twentieth century Britain.

As for Roadkill, like all barely recognisable, squashed dead things, it is best left alone.

  

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