Channel 4, Optimum Home Entertainment (13/04/09)

The Channel 4 trilogy Red Riding, pushed with a vigorous publicity campaign, is a dark, ambitious series built on the noir novels of David Pearce. Set in 70s/80s Yorkshire, the series features an impressive cast, including Sean Bean, David Morrissey and Rebecca Hall, all of whom provide real depth to the two-hour chunks of drama each episode provides here.

The series creates a powerful atmosphere of a seedy, corrupt Yorkshire and a shady power share between bent ‘coppers’ and good old fashioned ‘crooks’. The series has already been showered with critical praise, and hailed as one of the most intense dramas to arrive on British television screens for years and, impressively, each episode has been filmed by a different director.

Red Riding kicks off with a macabre plot based loosely on the true horror story of the murder of eleven year old Lesley Molseed in 1975. In the drama here, a local suspect (Michael Myshkin, played by David Mays) is pressured and tortured by the police into a false confession of the child murder. Subsequently in an episode ridden with violence, a ‘good guy’ journalist from the Yorkshire Post tries (and fails) to fight for justice in the case, whilst indulging himself romantically with one of the victim’s mothers.

It is an undeniably bleak moral landscape on offer in this series; reflected in a West Yorkshire dirtied with depression and corruption. The striking feature of the trilogy is that against this backdrop Red Riding utilises a conglomerate of fact, fiction, speculation and imagination which forces the viewer to question where the true stories end and the Red Riding narrative begins.

If the goal for Channel 4 was to leave viewers questioning their relationship to the (docu) drama on offer here, then it certainly succeeds. The quizzical among us may feel frustrated at the seemingly lack of clarity throughout, however.

In the end though, Red Riding does succeed in delivering a unsettlingly gripping drama, unsettling though it may be.

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