Last one on Thursday.

Thanks!

Close To The Enemy is unmissable - unmissable for all the wrong reasons. This show is seriously weird.

This line by Callum to his lover Rachel, while they are watching Rachel's husband playing cricket, summed it up for me: "You know he's batting like he knows something is going on between us."

It's weird, but I'm intrigued to know what's going to happen in the last episode.

Yes, it has been weirdly fascinating. Or fascinatingly weird! Victor must be the most annoying character ever. I so hoped he'd managed to top himself last week. According to Radio Times, the ending goes all Richard Curtis!

I found it hard to believe that Callum hadn't read that piece of paper before giving it to Alfred Molina. Also that there wouldn't be another copy of it somewhere.

He had read sufficient to know it was what he was looking for but somehow failed to see that Alfred Molina's character was listed as being there. Hmmmm.

I wonder if this would have been better if Stephen Poliakoff had been limited to just writing it, not directing as well.

It was one of those dramas which are so bad, they are good! As annoying as Victor was, I though Freddie Highmore played a blinder in the role. Not so sure about Jim Sturgess though.

Well, that was - er - um..... Totally cop out ending - 'and they all lived happily ever after.'

the scene where Calum was going to shoot Dieter with a rifle, skulking behind rubble, was totally out of character
if he was going to shoot him, he wouldve walked up to him with pistol in hand.

Apart from Dieter...

I like happy-ish endings! However, it was a little out of character with the rest of this.

I generally enjoyed this. Not bothered by some of the things others found to carp at. It had a 'slapstick' feel to it - not something to be taken seriously. Would have made a good Sunday evening drama...

It was an interesting story from the view point of the people who felt guilty for not doing more than they could to possibly prevent the war from happening.

That sums up my thoughts as well ! Definitely strange. As I posted weeks ago, it appeared to be a group of top quality actors pretending they were in a amateur dramatics production. None of them were particularly convincing in their relative parts, but this was very obviously deliberate. It gave it a sort of dream-like quality, but I've no idea what Poliakoff was trying to achieve.
Beautiful to look at, but as you say, very weird.

Yes, and turning a blind eye to the atrocities of war when perhaps they could have done something, however small in the grand scheme of things.

SP's work is rarely straightforward, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Despite the odd grumble, I sort of enjoyed it, if only for it keeping me sufficiently interested to see where it was going. But SP's recent work is a far cry from the glorious Shooting the Past and the one-off play Caught on a Train.

I absolutely LOVED every second of this. Absolutely everything about it.

Those who didn't 'get it' confuse me. I bet if had been shown on ITV and written by Steve Blogs you would have given it a chance. Possibly that would work the other way round too!

I obviously "got" the story and motivations of the characters. It was all fairly straightforward. What I didn't "get" was the way Poliakoff chose to tell it. All the characters seemed so stereotypical. The suave hero, the actress/good time girl, the secret agent who looked every inch a villain, the weak cuckolded husband, even the jazz/blues singer with her fake Southern drawl.
Perhaps he was paying homage to the movies of the 1930's/40's, the actors didn't seem to display the nuances of character you might expect from a modern director.

Well Dieter, slightly excessively, got killed. His daughter and wife got bereaved but presumably were made relatively whole by building a snowman. His assistant didn't matter at all. Alfred Molina's chickens may have been traumatised but were doomed anyway. Lindsay Duncan wasted her precious time for the sake of about one minute of screen time during which she said she could have done more - too blooming right Lindsay, I thought to myself. Oh and we didn't develop a faster than sound aircraft, though I suspect we had all resigned ourselves to that one.

I was slightly concerned that our hero's preferred method of killing Dieter was to do so in front of the bloke's loved ones, especially since he seemed to have untold opportunity to be a tad more considerate but there we are, he was plainly ever so slightly off his chump by that stage and nearly as irritating as Victor.

Disappointed? I certainly was.

Or Breaking the Silence; Coming in to Land; Playing With Trains; Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince.

Actually I'm afraid it's been a while now.

Still you never know - the next one may yet herald an Indian Summer and I will be there hoping.

Getting slammed on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Close-Enemy...dp/B01M5H48GI/

18 reviews at the time of posting, many by people who had seen no more than two or three episodes. Hardly a good sample.

I quite enjoyed it and really care little about ratings or I'd only watch Eastenders and the football.

More neg than pos though. Skimming the Amazon ratings of other Poliakoff stuff, CTTE is the lowest rated series out of everything he's done. Along with The Tribe and Glorious 39 I would say it is one of only a few misfires he's had in his career.

I've been a fan for 36 years, ever since Bloody Kids and the sublime Caught on a Train and can say with some conviction, he's running on fumes these days.

After the first episode, I wasn't sure whether to continue with this, but I was intrigued. (I was put off by Callum's weird drawl - speaking out the side of his mouth!).
I'm glad I stuck with it because I enjoyed it - but I still think it was weird, bad at times and unbelievable!!

The acting was amateurish, the dialogue was dire.
It was interesting to see that No. 3 Slip in Chatham Dockyard stood in for Harwich.

The worst aspect of the plot was the whole jet engine/supersonic flight thing, which was laughable. British jet engines were the best in the world at the time. The British supersonic project was the Miles M.52, for which work started in 1942. There was certainly no need for a German engineer. The test site in the tunnel was ludicrous. As for the "rivalry" with the Americans, they had been provided with Britain's research data, but eventually gave nothing back in return. Their first supersonic flight was with the Bell X-1, which was not an 800 mph jet but a rocket-powered aircraft that first exceeded Mach 1 at 700 mph. The M.52 was cancelled long before that.

All in all, a waste of my viewing time.

Apart from much of it being a waste of time, on the subject of the production values, no one in their right mind would leave a 1947 Wurly 1015 jukebox out in the snow.

They were like gold dust.

The one they had in the drama could likely only have come from a closed American air base or whathave you.
There were post-war import restrictions on the import of jukeboxes, 53% of their construction had to to be UK fabricated, hence the naff-looking BAL-AMI "fish-tank," machines made under licence from AMI by Balfour Engineering, in the mid fifties.

Only in the late fifties were the restrictions on USA made jukeboxes lifted, which then began to be seen in many coffee bars.

i loved it from beginning to end. You'd only need it on for 30 seconds to know it's a Poliakoff. He just creates a different world for each of his dramas and is faithful to it throughout. The way the colours and music are a bit over the top and the dialogue slightly stilted. Costumes are fantastic.