The Night Watch (spoilers!)

Aha!  Just as we get mired in cops and more cops, along comes this.  More historical lesbian shenanigans courtesy of Sarah Waters.  I know how un-PC that sounds, but... frankly it’s what distinguishes it from several other dramas about historical shenanigans.  This time it’s WWII and ‘anything goes’ and, judging from this, frequently went, without giving a damn.  First, we like the setting, we like the cast.

We won't discuss merits relative to the original novel, except to say that without literary and descriptive prose, and squeezed into 90 minutes, this is ultimately little more than a sexual merry-go-round told in semi-backwards fashion, a la Pinter's 'Betrayal'.  Kay, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, helpfully bookends as narrator, telling us we're joining partway through.

So, leaving sexual orientation out altogether, and taken chronologically, character A leaves character B for character C, who then leaves character A for character B.  With me so far?  Character B then turfs character C.  Meanwhile, a colleague of character C - character D - has a brother - character E - who is in love with character F, who, of-course, falls for character D. 

To reiterate, the cast are very good.  Anna Maxwell Martin, Claire Foy, Jodie Whittaker, Harry Treadaway, JJ Feild, Claudie Blakley, Kenneth Cranham, Liam Garrigan and Anna Wilson-Jones are all on fine form as frail, shell-shocked human beings, coping or not coping in their own way.  The costumes and sets are finely detailed, down to visible plumes of breath in cold wartime bedrooms.  However, it didn't really need the badly mocked-up shots of London burning, or St. Pauls by night, to set the scene.  Also, the music was distracting.  It sounded very weepy-melodrama and intruded on scenes unnecessarily (so they're unhappy: we get it).  And did we really need the rewind device to drag us back in time?  It did take us back - straight to the 80s and all that messing about with the VCR.

No TWNHs but one cliched moment when Kay, retrieving dead children after a bombing raid, stares at a pile of rubble with a rag doll on top.  To paraphrase a scene in 'The Wire' where they're watching war footage: "Oh no, not the doll again.  Can't he leave it out?  There's always the damn doll...."

Has it made us want to read the book?  Not really, despite having read and enjoyed others of her novels (Ali).  Perhaps that's the acid test for an adaptation?