Unforgiven - Radio 4 Waking the Dead Prequel. It's all wrong!

[AnnDerry]

I was so thrilled to discover there's a Waking the Dead prequel.
I was disappointed at the lack of Trevor Eve but there's something else which is really annoying me.

Assuming that the original TV series was set when it was made, and the actors were generally playing close to their real ages, how on earth can there be a prequel set as early as 1984? Frankie would have been in her teens and Mel still in primary school.

The plot is pretty good and the cast is excellent as always (love Sue Johnston and Holly Aird) but it's just so wrong it's making me very cross. If Mel was a newly qualified officer in 1984 she would have been in her late 30s by the time of the first tv series - and she very clearly wasn't.

I know the writer can do what she wants with her own characters but this is just silly.

I thought exactly the same, turning 40 in 1984 would make him 70-odd now. It just doesn't work!

Me too, but great to hear Sue and Holly on the radio!

Very creepy how they get fingerprints from a cadaver!

I'm enjoying it but yes the timeline is annoying me. I started looking up the actors, Frankie would have been 15 in 1984!

Actually the prequel is set 15 years before the show began. So if they turn 40 in the prequel, they are only 55 now.

I always felt you had to suspend disbelief in this anyway. The extent of Frankie's forensic knowledge and experience was always extraordinary, and it seemed inherently unlikely that the talents of such a brilliant polymath would be limited to one pretty small team.

I never really understood why Boyd had to disappear for most of this series , apart from Trevor Eve's unavailability, of course.