Plan B Forum

Twin Town opens with wide sweeping shots of seaside Swansea; to be the place of action for the next one and a half hours. The serene setting with miles upon miles of old semi-detached housing is suddenly cleaved apart by two young lads tearing through the neighbourhood in a two tone BMW 525. Julian and Jeremy are in deep trouble. Their dysfunctional family scrapes together a living from their dole money and odd-jobs offered to their father. The boys have long since turned to drug abuse and car theft leading a happy-go-lucky life in downtown no-hoper city. In due course the plot thickens as the boys are out for revenge against wealthy club owner Bryn who is not particularly helpful in providing compensation when their father is hit by an accident when working on his premises. The boys are fairly imaginative when it comes to planning their strike, culminating in scenes which all dog-haters and karaoke loathers will love.

Produced at the height of the nuclear paranoia and economic gloom that drove the Britain of Margaret Thatcher and the USA of Ronald Reagan, Troy Kennedy Martin's landmark drama broke new ground and handled uncomfortable subjects with sometimes unsettling depth and accuracy.

The late Bob Peck, in one of television's greatest performances, is Ronald Craven, a Yorkshire detective whose daughter Emma (Joanne Whalley) is gunned down outside their house in what is initially assumed to be a revenge attack related to Craven's former, and shadowy, intelligence past in Northern Ireland. The plot unwinds from here and slowly reveals a grand, all-encompassing conspiracy extending to the very highest levels as Craven investigates the circumstances of, and the motives behind, his daughter's death.

Peck plays Craven with a subtle emotional intensity rarely seen on television, the deadpan delivery of a man in the depths of grief contrasted by the emotions which his eyes always betray. A supporting cast of renegade CIA agents (Joe Don Baker giving the performance he was born for as brash Texan Darias Jedburgh), amiable but slightly sinister civil servants who never quite make it clear who they're working for (Charles Kay and Ian McNeice as Pendleton and Harcourt), environmental activists, trade-unionists, police and self-serving politicians make for a plot that twists and turns unpredictably as Craven's grief-powered explorations lead him ever deeper into the shadows, until the final, devastating, unexpected dénouement in the last episode that almost leaves more questions in the mind of the viewer than it answers

Crackpot wrote:Heck it was done well enough that I think it could be a good basis for a theological discussion with Meade about the apocalypse as presented in this movie.