G.B.H. (1991) TV series

Director: Robert Young

Writer: Alan Bleasdale

Composers: Elvis Costello, Richard Harvey

Starring: Robert Lindsay, Michael Palin, Dearbhla Molloy, Alan Igbon, Andrew Schofield, Philip Whitchurch, Julie Walters, Paul Oldham, Tom Georgeson, Peter-Hugo Daly, Jane Danson, Lindsay Duncan, Edward Mallon, Hayley Fairclough, Stephen Hall, Paul Butterworth, Peter Armitage

More info: IMDb

Tagline: A savage indictment of power.

Plot: Michael Murray is an ambitious and charismatic politician, Jim Nelson is a much loved headmaster of a local school for disturbed children. When the paths of these two men cross, things are destined never to be the same again.

My rating: 7.5/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

I only wanted to see this because it starred Michael Palin.  It's highly rated and all but JESUS FUCK!  It's 9 and a half hours long!!!!  Put that into your pipe and smoke it!  Each episode of this series is about an hour and twenty minutes long and there are seven of them.  Now, the first episode moves along OK until the final half hour where it very intense.  Now I'm completely on board.  Whatever feelings I had about giving up were gone.  It was such a powerful half hour that there was no way I wasn't going to see this through.  The next couple of episodes weren't nearly as captivating but they did hold my interest.  The two leads, Lindsay and Palin, are magnificent.  The series is mostly about political intrigue but there's more to it than that.  It's mostly serious but as each episode played, it got surprisingly funny to the point that episode 4 is loaded with slapstick comedy.  At first I thought it was too much but seeing Lindsay running around the hotel with his hand thrusting in the air along with his eye tick (these things happen to him when he gets too nervous) feels like something out of a FAWLTY TOWERS (1975) episode and not this.  I ended up laughing a lot before that episode was over.

Then with episode 5 the silliness continued but scaled back a lot until at least episodes 6 and 7 things were back to political intrigue territory and became gravely serious and delivers a satisfying finale, tying up any loose ends the major players have.  The tone is all over the place.  The comedy only sometimes works but at times it feels unnecessary and awkward.  More than a few scenes go on for too long, give too much information or flesh out characters that don't matter one bit to the main characters.  Jim's (Palin) poet friend Martin, for example, is a character that I loved and I dug his storyline and arc.  However, it didn't seem to have anything to do with the major threads of the overall story.  His bits could've been taken out completely and would've had little to no effect on the series.  There's enough of that kind of thing that you could probably lose an episode or two.  I would've also preferred that the film, if we can call it that, didn't stray so much into silly territory and stayed closer to the more serious aspects that these two men are embroiled in.  It's still a good watch and it's a good look at how politics is played but it could've been better.  I'm also writing this right after finishing a two day binge from start to finish so I've barely allowed myself time to let it all sink in.  Plus I'm nursing a cold but I won't hold that against the Labor Party.