The Red Riding Trilogy (DVD)

As a native of West Yorkshire who grew up and worked in the area throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I can certainly identify with the dystopian atmosphere that suffused this dark and miasmic trilogy, or 'thrillogy' as some advertising slogan might had it for something else entirely. Police and general political corruption is never an easy thing to have to contemplate in an ostensibly democratic country, especially in a TV programme that almost eviscerates the dark underbelly of a society in which violence is seemingly never too far away. This is true of Red Riding, a tale told over an extended time period but with the same depressing message of hopelessness, the ...  Read the complete review

There was a lot of hype for this three-part drama recently shown on Channel 4, and for once the hype was thoroughly deserved. Red Riding is a murky, violent and frankly terrifying exploration of corruption in the West Yorkshire police spanning across the 70's and 80's. Each episode centres around a particular year (1974, 1980 and 1983) where serial murders of women or children are occurring. The 1980 episode involves the real-life Yorkshire Ripper case, which becomes entangled with the other fictional killings. This is a world where the police routinely torture and even kill suspects and anyone who gets in their way (including their less corrup colleagues), ...  Read the complete review

This three-part drama was shown last month on channel 4 and is based on a quartet of books by novellist David Peace about Police corruption in Yorkshire over the course of several years. Peace of course has become better known recently, mainly for writing the novel The Damned United about football manager, Brian Clough, which has been filmed starring British actor, Michael Sheen. Channel 4, when it commissioned this series, decided the Red Riding books would work better on television as a trilogy and dropped the second book from their story-line as it featured more incidental characters rather than the big personalities that dominated the other novels. Whether or not ...  Read the complete review