Well done RTÉ and Amber – at least you got us talking
YES, I know, I know. You’re probably sick to the back teeth of hearing about Amber at this stage. Amber this, Amber that. Everyone with a Twitter account and an opinion has given their tuppenceworth by now.
One thing that ought to be said, though, is the fact it became such a talking point amounts in itself to a victory for the RTÉ drama department. People who didn’t see it were out of the conversational loop for the week.
It must have felt a bit like going into school during the early Eighties having missed an episode of Grange Hill or the previous night’s Top Of The Pops. And, trust me on this one, that wasn’t a mistake you made twice.
Credit where it is due to the team responsible, then, for making a show that captured the public imagination at a national level. Let’s be honest, that doesn’t happen too often with Montrose’s output.
Nor, however, does it necessarily mean that Amber was any good. It was undoubtedly well-placed and the shifting timeline worked particularly well.
But like thousands of others who watched the drama unfold over four nights, I felt badly shortchanged by the final scene.
Not to the extent that I wasted several hours airing my grievances on social media networks, I might add, but you know where I’m coming from.
Come Thursday morning, though, I’d revised my opinion. The producers have a very good point when they say that people do disappear off the face of the Earth and that it would have been trite to finish the four-hour narrative with Amber’s disappearance being neatly resolved.
Yet if we accept that the finale showing Amber (Lauryn Canny) walking off into the sunset wasn’t a simple cop-out, then there were other elements of the story that looked plain lazy. No- one disputes the random nature of everyday life, but it was taken to extremes here.
The sequence of events surrounding the discovery and then loss of Amber’s phone – carelessly discarded by a search volunteer, left in a desk drawer by another and finally thrown down a drain by a mischievous child – was just too convenient, for starters.
Meanwhile, the characterisation of sl eazy prisoner Terrence O’Donoghue (Ned Dennehy) was woefully one- dimensional. I’m no expert, but I’d have thought there were more sophisticated ways to make a jailbird appear sinister than apparently sending him to the same hairdresser as Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Not that the central casting approach ended there, though. The portrayal of hard- nosed reporter Maeve Flynn-Dunne (Justine Mitchell), who just happened to also be Amber’s godmother, simply wasn’t convincing.
For all that, though, Amber had its moments. The producers took a brave move by depicting the teenager’s father Ben ( David
Murray) as such an unlikeable character. But the undoubted star of the four-part series was Eva Birthistle as Amber’s mother.
Whereas such a role could have been overplayed by a lesser actress, her performance was subtle and understated.
Not only that, though, she also skilfully portrayed her character’s development over the two-year period that the drama traces.
The early episodes showed her visibly ageing as the grief of her daughter’s disappearance took its toll; by the end, she seemed to have reached a resigned acceptance and was trying her best to get on with life.
And, truth to tell, it was as a char- acter study that Amber worked best. Despite its flaws, it presented a harrowing picture of the impact that a person’s disappearance can have throughout the family and beyond.
No, it certainly didn’t tick all the boxes. But it was a very good effort. And we should be glad that RTÉ is commissioning shows like this.