The Ark

The BBC offers a fresh take on a well known tale.
The story of Noah’s Ark is so familiar and often told that you wonder whether there is anything new that can be brought to it. Last year’s Russell Crowe fronted film Noah somehow managed to miss out God altogether and turn the title character into a heartless madman. Thankfully Eastenders scribe Tony Jordan takes the opposite approach, ingraining faith and God as the cornerstone of the story and his Noah is the opposite of mad. Instead he is a family man of remarkable understanding, raising four sons and inspiring utter devotion from his wife. When he embarks on his boat building work it is this faith that is challenged and this lies at the heart of what is a family based drama with just a bit of epic for ballast.

"Doesn't look like the ferry's coming, fancy building our own?"

What Remains (episodes 3 and 4)

Four hours of tension ends in a frenzy as Tony Basgallop’s taut BBC1 drama concludes.

Compelling to the end, What Remains is an exercise in building tension and atmosphere before letting it all out in a frantic final sequence. Though spread across four episodes, the drama has the feel of a film about it. The measured camera work, creepy sound effects, insistent unsettling incidental music as well as characters that don’t waste words all add to the filmic feel. Director Coky Giedroyc excels in finding those unusual corners of the building, her cameras crawling around as if we are in a horror film. The result is something that may perhaps lose its grasp of reality somewhere during the last half hour but remains riveting till the last frame.

What Remains (episodes 1 and 2)

What Remains takes the concept of slow burn drama to a new level of stillness. Over the course of two hours very little has actually happened yet under the funereal veneer lots is going on. It takes a very good writer, director and cast to keep you watching and yet somehow they do. For all its glacial distance, What Remains is surprisingly compulsive as each tiny morsel is delivered making you hungry for more. It shares genes with Broadchurch of course, as you suspect every new drama this winter probably will, and also the Scandinavian television from which ITV’s hit itself drew but this is something even more considered. The best thing about it is that it could turn out to have a disappointing or obscure resolution but you just know we’ll watch it till the end anyway.

 Spoilers past this point.....