Sunday night telly – a bussman’s holiday

Posted on | August 31, 2008 | No Comments

Just spent a depressing evening watching a re-run of the Fiona’s Story screenplay on BBC1, about a wife who discovers her husband has been viewing child pornography. On the whole this is a really interesting look at a difficult subject, but two things really didn’t ring true for me (one perhaps more trivial than the other).

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The plot revolves around a perfect middle class family and a happily married wholly ‘normal’ couple. Except that by the end of the programme its apparent he’s a man with an extremely controlling personality who is fundamentally unable to accept responsibility for his actions, who has issues with his self-worth and who takes out his sense of inadequacy on other people (whether that is via child porn or by lashing out and assaulting his wife at times of extreme stress). I can’t suspend my disbelief far enough to accept that this character was ever the perfect husband.

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And secondly – visually the social worker was a complete stereotype: a rotund, scarf wearing, beaded lady (that’s beaded not beaRded). Also, she had a bedside manner of a dead fish and asked a raft of THE MOST pointless questions in deadpan style, the answers to which I would have thought ought to have prompted the continuation of the chlid protection investigation that this was presumably supposed to be a dramatisation of, rather than the closing of the file.

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