Prismark10 I have wanted to review this title for ages and the recent re-showing by the BBC allowed me to admire this series once more. Of course almost 30 years later, the drama has aged a little but its not lost any of its power or relevance.The television drama is a landmark especially for the BBC. It signalled a change as to how drama productions would change with a shift away from the multi camera technique and realising the importance of good photography, direction, music as well as writing.The series was made in an era of the encroaching economic liberalism of the Reagan/Thatcher era. Private companies wanted control of government industries and there was paranoia over nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and the rise of green politics.Troy Kennedy Martin wrote a timely and in some ways prophetic nuclear conspiracy thriller of shady private organisations and Machiavellian governments in this unsettling drama.The much missed Bob Peck was an unknown when this drama was shown but earned a slew of awards soon after. He plays Craven a dogged Yorkshire detective whose daughter Emma (Joanne Whalley) is killed outside his house. At first it is assumed that the intended victim was Craven.However it is revealed that Emma was involved in a radical ecology group and had broken into a nuclear reactor. While Peck plays the grief stricken dad in search of answers, Joe Don Baker plays brash Texan CIA agent Jedburgh with a love of golf and Come Dancing (an early version of 'Dancing with the Stars' without celebrities!)Baker was a man who was a familiar face in television and cinema, Jedburgh was a role of a lifetime and boy, does Baker know it. He also brings a lot of light relief in this very serious drama but we are made well aware that he has teeth made of steel.The drama is rounded off by Charles Kay and Ian McNeice as a duo of unlikely amiable civil servants who bring a lot of sly and indeed camp humour with a touch of sinister touches.The series also featured an appearance by a real life politician, Michael Meacher who would go on to become a Labour Environmental Minister many years later. It also has fictional self serving politicians, various spies, political activists, police and even trade unionists regarded as public enemy number one at the time.The drama has an element of magical realism as Craven has visions of his daughter throughout the episodes, there is a sinister undertone threaded throughout the series and the standout scene belongs to Jedburgh in the Gleneagles Hotel as he whips out some plutonium.Finally a mention of the director, Martin Campbell a man who would later go on to re-invent the James Bond films not once but twice as well as later remaking this for a cinema audience. Campbell who started off making some sex comedies in the 1970s knows a good script when he sees it and really delivers the goods here.

alshwenbear1 The last time I was really captivated, I was reading The "Red Riding Trilogy" and then I watched the movies and I longed again for something that could satisfy my hunger for a good story,fortunately Mel Gibson's "Edge of Darkness" (2010),that took me almost three years to finally watch, drove me to move as fast as I could and got me a copy of the original BBC miniseries, with six episodes, and excellent acting. Bob Peck (Unfortunately killed by a velociraptor in Jurassic Park), and more unfortunately dead by cancer in 1999, plays the police inspector grieving for the senseless murder of his daughter, but contrary to what you or I, or Mel Gibson would do,he represses more of the time his sad feelings. Ronald Craven (Peck) goes into the investigation of the reasons and guilty parties, let's say with a cool level head, and some help among others from Darius Jedburgh (Joe Don Baker) and the "ghost" of Emma,his daughter. Not much for me to add that other reviewers haven't said already, just my recommendation watch the miniseries, and watch the Mel Gibson movie.Both of them are worth of your time,personally I am looking forward for the holidays when my daughter comes from college and we can watch it together!

bandw This story of a Yorkshire cop, Ronald Craven, who pursues an investigation of the murder of his daughter that leads to political intrigue did not have enough going for it for me to feel that it was worth the five hour investment.The initial sequences could have been more focused so that the main players and their functions were more clearly identified. Between all the ministers, policemen, agents, hearing attendees, and so forth, it took awhile to sort them all out. Then there are characters that come out of nowhere whose role I was never certain of, like Clemmy who was introduced simply as "a friend of Jedburgh." Before we have any idea about her, Craven is in bed with her.A major irritant for me was Craven's being talked to by his dead daughter Emma. She not only talks to him, but appears as a ghost image. Maybe the screenwriter was thinking of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's using the ghost of Hamlet's father in "Hamlet." But we are not talking "Hamlet" here, since the ghost of Craven's daughter gives advice at the level of how to load laundry. I think the use of Emma's ghost came from the perception that the story needed an attractive female in the cast. Not content to borrow from Shakespeare, the screenwriter took a page out of Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" by having a mysterious spring appear at the site of Emma's murder.There are a host of improbabilities and near absurdities. How was it that Craven was able to get entry to an empty control center where he could break into an MI6 computer? How did the people at Northmoor know that Craven et al. were coming? How did Nedburgh escape from Northmoor? Why were the Brits secretly processing plutonium in the first place?--the U.S. and Britain had been cooperating closely on nuclear development since the 1950s. The map of the mine was one hundred years old but "had not changed an inch." Really? The installation of a nuclear facility and bomb shelters had not altered the plans in the interim? And the idea that an old phone dating from the 1950s would still have a direct connection to a closet at 10 Downing Street was rather absurd--even Dick Tracy rarely used such a contrived escape. I could go on.Joe Don Baker really gets into his role as the spunky and witty CIA agent Darius Jedburgh and he is the bright spot as far as the acting goes. The rest of the cast turns in journeyman's work. I found Bob Peck's performance a bit flat, but then the role did not demand much more than he manfully handle his grief, which he accomplished by looking worried and glum.There is some heavy pontificating near the end between Jedburgh and Craven about the outcome of the standoff between mankind and the earth. Can mankind ultimately destroy the earth or can the earth always be able to handle whatever mankind can throw at it? I think that if mankind threw a full scale nuclear war at the earth, then earth may survive, but mankind would not.Willie Nelson's song "Time of the Preacher" comes up two or three times and from that I deduced that it must have some deep significant message that applies to the film, but I could never figure that out. Maybe the screenwriter just liked the song? Initially I found the guitar score by Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen to be creative and intriguing, but it soon became repetitive and monotonous.I thought the mini-series "State of Play" was fantastic, but "Edge of Darkness" was pretty much lost on me.

Tweekums I first watched this when it was first shown on the BBC back in the eighties and thought it was a contender for the best television drama that I'd seen, twenty odd years later I still feel that way.Bob Peck plays DI Ronald Craven, a Yorkshire detective who's daughter is killed in the opening scenes, initially he thinks that he was the intended target but when he discovered that she was the sole survivor from a break it at a nuclear storage facility (Northmoor) he isn't so sure.When he travels down to London he is met by Pendleton and Harcourt, two people working in a covert government agency who in turn introduce him to Texan CIA operative Darius Jedburgh, played by Joe Don Baker. As the story proceeds they investigate what is going on at Northmoor and to eventually break in.I won't say more about the plot as it could spoil it. I'll just say that all of the acting is superb especially that of Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker, both on career best form. If you buy just one television mini series on DVD this should be the one.