As 80s thriller Edge of Darkness is repeated
6 episodes with 2 shown each Saturday night over 3w
Regularly cited by critics as one of the best TV dramas of all time, and a launchpad for many careers, the celebrated BBC thriller Edge of Darkness is going to be re shown on Saturday November 1st on bbc 4
I was 12 when this was first on in 1985 so obv didn’t watch it then tbh never even heard of it
An intense, brooding drama, its story of a detective's hunt for his daughter's killer escalating into a battle for the planet is more on trend than ever in our world of Extinction Rebellion and anti-government demonstrations.
And a hundred series that followed bore its thematic and stylistic DNA – everything from State of Play in 2003 to this year's The Capture.
As for Edge of Darkness's longevity – it regularly scores highly on lists of best-ever dramas – perhaps the anti-establishment dimension helps? "It’s always difficult to know quite why these things are so successful," Campbell tells RT.
"Whether the politics of the time still echo today... they probably do given the terrible things that are going on now, the amount of corruption and deceit and lies..
Edge of Darkness certainly grips from the get-go: on a stormy night, off-duty inspector Ronald Craven (Peck) collects his daughter Emma (Joanne Whalley) from a student's union meeting at teacher training college.
As they dash through the rain from their car to the house, a gunman calls out his name, Emma dashes forward and he fires both barrels into her chest. She dies in his arms.
Reeling with shock and grief, Craven nevertheless skips compassionate leave to make his own inquiries into Emma's murder.
It's a trail that leads him from memories of his stint in Northern Ireland to the shadowy corridors of government and the cramped mines of an underground reprocessing plant.
And though it's a male-heavy cast, two of its brightest lights are female. Apart from the feisty intelligence agent Clementine, or Clemmie, as played by Zoë Wanamaker, there of course is the bright-eyed, idealistic young scientist Emma Craven (Joanne Whalley), whose brutal killing so traumatises her father that she becomes a projection of his grief. Or so we first believe.
But when Whalley and Peck are both in two-shot, we realise that she is actually a ghost, counselling her floundering dad from beyond the grave. "Her influence on the show is great," as Campbell puts it.