When disaster strikes
MOURNFUL opening credits, an ominous title and a cast that includes drama heavyweight Sarah Lancashire – nothing about this series is going to be light, that’s for sure.
Of course, it begins brightly enough, as dramas often do when there’s impending misery. Lancashire plays chatty hairdresser Polly Bevan, who witters on to her clients and coolly kicks her daughter’s boyfriend out of the house, via the window.
Her husband, Ewan (Mark Lewis Jones), is dressed as a banana as he’s about to take part in a local fun run.
“Today should be fun,” he grins, which is basically TV code for: “Something terrible is about to happen.”
We follow a few other members of the fictional Welsh community of Glyngolau, a ‘left behind’ town that is finally seeing some regeneration in the form of a new project.
Everyone is happy and going about their business, leaving us with a horrible sense of dread.
Juxtaposed with colourful balloons and costumes, cameras pan to a group of teenagers breaking in to the construction site of the new development. They just want to make mischief, but soon there’s the inevitable catastrophe.
What follows are harrowing scenes that make for tough viewing. And the drama turns to a community confronting issues of blame, revenge and social, corporate and personal responsibility.
Writer Jack Thorne has revealed that, while this is not based on the Grenfell tragedy, it certainly inspired some of the themes. With a talented cast, including Joanna Scanlan and Sidse Babett Knudsen, this is a gripping and distressing tale of a disaster that should never have happened.