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The story of Blue Dove goes back to 2001, when it was to be Paul's first major TV since 1999's The Passion. After successes on both the big-screen and the stage, this was to be his return to the mass awareness of national TV. Somehow though ITV never seemed to find a place for it in the schedules, though it was well received in both Canada and New Zealand!
But in 2004, with the launch of new digital channel ITV3, and after three other top-rated TV appearances on BBC; Canterbury Tales - The Wife of Bath, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, and A Thing Called Love, Paul's first work for ITV finally gets an airing!
What's it all about?
Drama set in and around a family-run ceramics business, Blue Dove, that runs into trouble after chairman Jim Weston dies from a heart attack, leaving the company in the hands of his two children, Nick (Paul Nicholls) and Clare (Esther Hall) and Jim's secret lover Jenny (Ruth Gemmell), who was also Nick's production supervisor at the factory.
What was good about it?
- A good cast including Paul Nicholls and Esther Hall although we found it hard to swallow that they are 27-year-old twins.
- Paul Nicholls is especially good as Nick in a central role which eschews many of the benevolent common traits of a dramatic protagonist and replaces them with an attitude that is insensitive, calculating and impulsive. His only displays of great emotion are after his dad announces his move to Spain and after his subsequent heart attack. On both occasions, Nick violently searches out a scapegoat in the forms of Jenny and slimy finance director Graham respectively.
- The number of conflicts that built throughout the first episode should be enough fuel to last the series. They included Nick v Jenny, who now owns one third of Blue Dove after Jim changed his will; Nick v Graham, whom Nick holds partly responsible for his dad's death; Graham v Gerry, Nick's uncle and the black sheep of the family who was in the car when Nick's mother was killed; Nick v Ian, Clare's husband and Blue Dove's salesman, who feels marginalised when Nick goes to Amsterdam alone to renegotiate a business contract; and Nick v Nick, who feels guilt after he brought Gerry in to work for Blue Dove, news that caused his dad's heart attack when Graham told him.
What was bad about it?
- Too many dramatic clichés to create artificial scenes of high emotion – of the three staples of births, marriages and deaths, we were treated to the nuptials of Clare and Ian and Jim's untimely fatal heart attack.
- Many of the factory employees were drawn with little individual care and attention and became ciphers who yearn simply for weekends, pay packets and weddings to get them through the crushing drudgery of their lives.
- Too much of the necessary first episode biographical exposition was clumsy and synthetic, such as when Nick called Clare "sis"; Jim said to his kids: "You're 27, for God's sake"; and when Jim referred to Ian as "my future son-in-law".
- Clare seemed to wear the same pair of tight trousers throughout the whole episode, even under her wedding dress, as if they had been welded on to her legs.
- The tone at the start was far too happy and joyous during Clare's her wedding and we were just waiting for the inevitable, precipitous descent into misery and woe. The way into which distress was inserted through ominous music at the wedding when Graham observed an important business contact in conversation with Blue Dove's rivals was inadvertently hilarious.
HANG ON TO YOUR seats for a new breakneck series set in the go-go world of, um, pottery?
OK, so the subject isn't sexy, but the series is, with romance, backstabbing and loads of behind-the-scenes intrigue as a family tries to cope with a change of leadership and an interloper among them at their small pottery factory in Derbyshire.
Blue Dove, a smart and engaging new U.K. import that starts Thursday at 11 p.m on the W Network, ends after the first hour with the family in crisis and the business in disarray, but when the episode opens all is rosy with a wedding in the works.
Ready to walk down the aisle is Clare Weston (Esther Hall), twin sister of Nicholas (Paul Nicholls), and daughter of Blue Dove owner Jim Weston (David Calder), a bear of a man who's guided the 100-year-old business to good times with 50 employees and a quality product manufactured at home and not overseas by underpaid children.
Clare, who's also a designer at the factory, is marrying Ian Andrews (Robert Cavanah), the good natured but perhaps not skilled enough sales manager for the company.
After getting the "factory girl" send-off of having clay-soaked water tossed over her head, Clare and Ian proceed to a gala of a wedding, which is the last happy time the couple may experience for a while.
The first hint that all is not well in the Weston family is when Clare begs her father to invite his hated brother Gerry (Nicky Henson) to the event, something Jim will not even consider for reasons that become clear later.
The dark clouds continue to gather after the wedding with dear old dad suddenly announcing that he's signing over control of the business to Clare and Nicholas, news that's tainted by the fact that he also plans to skip off to Spain with the shop's production supervisor Jenny Page (Ruth Gennell).
Uh-oh.
Add to this the fact that Blue Dove is about to lose a huge contract, thanks to some ineptitude on Ian's part and the fact that Asian labour is undercutting their bids, and you've got a company that is about to slip into the red.
Against dad's wishes - tough luck old man, as he's off skivving in Spain with his tart - the now-managing siblings bring in hated uncle Gerry to help turn things around at Blue Dove. Seems the estranged brother was once a principal in the family business until ousted by Jim a decade before and now operates a successful retail business.
But, wouldn't you know it, Gerry has ideas of his own on what to do with Blue Dove, and they may not be in the best interest of his niece and nephew.
Oh, and did I mention that Nicholas is a bit of a lady's man, canoodling with one of the factory's employees, while hated Jenny Page returns from Spain to stick her oar in things.
Delicious.
Written and created by Lucy Gannon (Peak Practice, Bramwell), Blue Dove offers enough tantalizing business intrigue, family squabbles and romantic entanglements to keep the hour-long episodes clipping along.
Add to that good performances by familiar faces like Nicholls as Nicholas (Eastenders), Hall as Clare (Queer as Folk), not to mention the bombast of Calder as Jim and the bitch-on-wheels turn by Gennell as his paramour and you've got a drama worth spending some time with.
Who knew plates could be so interesting?
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Copyright: © 2000 - 2006, Adrian Skeates
This Page created: 24 June, 2001
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