Colourless Amber not worth spending four nights in for
TV Watch with Declan Tierney
Boredom is a funny thing. It can make you nod off or just wonder why you are tolerating a particular situation in the first place. Such was the situation at the weekend when the first instalment of RTE’s high profile drama series was shown.
The disappearance of 14 years old Amber was about as captivating as watching Hayley Cropper’s imminent demise over on Coronation Street, wishing they would bring the situation to an end rather than trying to milk it for everything that it is not worth.
The four-night series Amber is something similar in that it takes a lot of telling but there is very little happening in the process. In fact I have decided to skip the intervening two episodes and just watch the final one as there is no point in putting myself through such torture.
Okay, for those of you who had the great fortune not to watch this, it involves the disappearance of a teenager who is subsequently seen taking a Luas into the city centre in Dublin and taking it back again and disembarking at a stop that she would not normally frequent.
The mother goes ballistic and the father less so. He was the last one to see her as he was dropping her off at a friend’s house which, apparently she did not enter.
It is an amazing piece of writing in view of the fact that the parents conduct interviews with people who may or may not have seen their daughter while members of the Gardaí stand in the background taking notes.
There is also a counter on the screen. At one stage it went from day four to day twenty four and then to day one hundred and ninety. The reason for this is quite bizarre when the writers would have been better off confining the story to a couple of days or even a couple of hours for that matter.
The parents are separated and have a rather frosty relationship. The mother (Eva Birthistle) is friendly with a journalist who writes a two-page spread on the disappearance which is not to the parents’ liking and there is a split in the camp.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.