True Love - Too Much Flash and Not Enough Fiction

I watched the first episode of True Love, Dominic Savage's series of five short romances filmed in Margate for the BBC. It's the televisual equivalent of flash fiction - each one is a small but perfectly formed twenty-five minutes long.

The filmette was beautifully photographed and David Tennant brought considerable passion to his portrayal of the central character of Nick, whose happily married life is turned upside down by the reappearance of his first love, but the overall effect was slightly weird.  With time so short, writer and director Savage concentrated on the big dramatic set pieces and left out everything in between, so that the narrative seemed jerky, with none of the small but telling details, the warp and weft, that knits up a good story.

The high production values made it easy to enjoy, but I found myself yearning for a bit of length. I'm not much of a short story writer or reader, I like room to manoeuvre, so I guess it was inevitable that I would find True Love in some way unsatisfying. For me, the literary importance of having the space to explore nuance  and detail is crucial.  If you turn your back on that and focus on the edited highlights of an emotional crisis, you end up with a story which is two-dimensional: not drama, but melodrama.

The big picture is always less interesting, it's the small detail, the oblique close-up, the sideways glance, which is usually more revealing...

(Though what's really fascinating is what goes on behind closed doors...)