Fiona's Story (2008) Online

Wow.. I was just blown away by this BBC drama. Gina was FANTASTIC as Fiona. The cinematography was interesting and different.. just loved evreything about it. It made me cry in the first half hour and I don't usually cry at stuff on TV. So well done! I just love Gina. Her emotion is just portrayed so well.. how she keeps it all inside then just finally lets go and screams and shouts like you want her to at the start. I also think the children were good actors .. it's hard to be a child actor so they did well. And of course the guy who played Simon. He was very good - he made my skin crawl near the end. Brilliant Fantastic stuff. More like this, please.

Never glamorising it's subject, never showing anything to offend per say. This Drama does exactly what it says on the tin, it is Fiona's story, the story of a woman forced to think about her husband in a way which she should never have had to.

With Excellent performances by the couple, this drama really made me think about perceptions, and about how a perfectly innocent act one day is given a sinister edge the next.

My sympathy always lay with Fiona, someone who is obviously hurt and confused, even when an extra-marital affair on her side becomes apparent- which i understood, but not necessarily approved of. And it really made me think, well worth the watch.

My one criticism is there wasn't enough light in it, and by that I mean the type given out by a light bulb or the sun,quite dark most of the time- although I suppose that goes with the subject.

Fiona lives in suburbia as a housewife to her hard-working (and, it must be said, inattentive) husband Simon and her daughters. Their normal life is disrupted one morning when the police arrive to question Simon and seize his computers under suspicions oh him accessing child pornography. The police build their case and proceed with prosecutions while Fiona frantically tries to hold her family together and deal with her own feelings of betrayal, mistrust and fear.

In a spot normally reserved for comforting, cocooning dramas such as Marple and the like, this film was put out to viewers finishing their weekends. I say this just to make note of it as it did surprise me that such a harrowing film would be in this slot as opposed to midweek (for example) but I have no issues with it at all even if I'm surprised the schedulers made this call. The film doesn't really deal with child pornography as an issue and it doesn't concern itself too much with the machinations of the legal process but, as the title suggests, it tells the story of the family members who suddenly find themselves married to/living with someone who has been looking at images of child abuse. It doesn't sound like a great Sunday night in and nor should it because it is a distressing piece thanks mainly to a great performance from Gina McKee. She dominates the film and is utterly convincing with a strong script that takes her through all sorts of emotions, the vast majority of which feel very real.

With this as the "narrative" it was very important to get this right and the writers do. By taking Fiona on a journey of emotion, the viewer gets taken on one as well and it does make for tough questions; I'm sure there will be some who get frustrated after 10 minutes that Fiona didn't feel a certain way immediately and make a stand (the Radio Times letters page was amusing the next week) but to me this aspect did work and made for engaging television. Morally I think most of us know our view on child pornography and that it probably contains the word "abhorrent" but this is very different to being personally affected by it and not able to stand remote and judge someone without any impact on your situation – some viewers have missed that this is what the film is looking at but I don't think that is the film's fault. What IS the film's fault is a rather lacklustre ending which just seems to "stop"; this is partly down to the focus being on Fiona and not the case – so while the case has an ending, her story does not, but still I did think that the writers would have done better with the final five minutes.

Equally as good as McKee is Jeremy Northam, and credit to him for doing the role as few "stars" (which is what he is beyond the UK) would risk such an unsympathetic character but he does it well. The children are all natural as well and were well cast, but I'm not sure why Jimi Mistry bothered for such a small role and little screen-time, perhaps there was more on paper than made it into the final cut or maybe he just saw a good film and wanted a part of it. And that is what Fiona's Story is – a really well written and acted piece of personal drama where director Shergold keeps us close to the family at all times and never lets us escape into the wider community of the story and thus to a more remote vantage point. While I did find the ending a bit disappointing, otherwise it is gripping and intelligence stuff – not cheery by any means but well worth seeing.

This drama had such potential, but unfortunately it did not deliver. I'm always impressed when the BBC tackles such sensitive issues, and in the first hour I believed the story was being told realistically and with fantastic emotional performances from the leads. After this point of the 90 minutes, however, I spent the last half hour irritated by Fiona's reactions to everything her husband did, and anxiously waiting for the turning point when she would actually DO something remotely 'normal'. She was supposedly trying only to protect her children throughout, yet she failed to do that simply by granting unsupervised access, even after researching child pornography and coming face to face with the reality of it. Simon even admitted that he had looked at 'vile' and 'violent' pictures. This fictional drama, was apparently based on many true stories, but I find it very difficult to believe that the majority of women would be so naive and weak if this happened to them. Unfortunately, waiting for the turning point - and it never arriving, completely spoilt this for me, and the ending just made me angry. Why would she let him get away with it? I'm left dumbfounded.