Ah, I haven't rewatched this since it came out in 1991. Back then I was a 13 year old and to see it now 30 years later is to watch an entirely different programme.
Honestly, I thought it was better than it is, I know I loved it back in 1991 or I thought I did. I can't imagine how I grasped all the adult themes in GBH but something must have resonated. Perhaps it hasn't aged well, perhaps thanks to the age of the internet and Americanised television I'm used to a faster paced more visceral experience. This is me saying I don't think it has aged well, but this isn't because I don't have the patience for subtlety crafted film-making because I certainly do.
In GBH there's a lot of clunkiness that I wasn't aware of before, I felt that Alan Bleasdale was whisking us off on a tangents that deviated unhelpfully from the plot. It is also an incredible feat that Bleasdale managed to create some +7hrs of television without a single likeable character!
Jim Nelson is a scab and we're supposed to sympathise with him, he still broke the picket despite knowing of the general strike. Martin the poet is perhaps the only half-likeable character and he's an adulterer. Only Alan Igbons' Teddy sticks out in my mind although I enjoyed the character of Peter but you certainly couldn't like him.
Ultimately G. B. H. Is very idiosyncratic and of it's time. A time where Labour and Conservative were unmistakably opposed. In the first episode I was struck by just how much Michael Murray foreshadowed Tony Blair, and well, the rest is history. One last note on the shady conspiratorial nature of the MI5 involvement - given what we know today and what we saw happen to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn's meteoric rise and equally meteoric descent. The institutions of power will not allow a true left government to govern this country again. The vested interests of the clandestine elite have a power we can barely imagine yet I can imagine their reach being even more pervasive than before thanks to social media and news addiction.
Honestly, I thought it was better than it is, I know I loved it back in 1991 or I thought I did. I can't imagine how I grasped all the adult themes in GBH but something must have resonated. Perhaps it hasn't aged well, perhaps thanks to the age of the internet and Americanised television I'm used to a faster paced more visceral experience. This is me saying I don't think it has aged well, but this isn't because I don't have the patience for subtlety crafted film-making because I certainly do.
In GBH there's a lot of clunkiness that I wasn't aware of before, I felt that Alan Bleasdale was whisking us off on a tangents that deviated unhelpfully from the plot. It is also an incredible feat that Bleasdale managed to create some +7hrs of television without a single likeable character!
Jim Nelson is a scab and we're supposed to sympathise with him, he still broke the picket despite knowing of the general strike. Martin the poet is perhaps the only half-likeable character and he's an adulterer. Only Alan Igbons' Teddy sticks out in my mind although I enjoyed the character of Peter but you certainly couldn't like him.
Ultimately G. B. H. Is very idiosyncratic and of it's time. A time where Labour and Conservative were unmistakably opposed. In the first episode I was struck by just how much Michael Murray foreshadowed Tony Blair, and well, the rest is history. One last note on the shady conspiratorial nature of the MI5 involvement - given what we know today and what we saw happen to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn's meteoric rise and equally meteoric descent. The institutions of power will not allow a true left government to govern this country again. The vested interests of the clandestine elite have a power we can barely imagine yet I can imagine their reach being even more pervasive than before thanks to social media and news addiction.