TV Review - Red Rose

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TV Review - Red Rose Spoilers - BBC TV A Black-Mirror-esque tale in eight episodes on the dangers of phone app and internet technology. After an apparent (much is not as it appears) teenage suicide, the action shifts to Bolton, where High School teenagers celebrate the end of their exams with a secret boozy rave on the Westmoorland Moors, near Bolton, Lancashire. During the bash, one lonely detached girl receives an invite on her phone to download a mysterious answer to all your problems app called Red Rose (with its logo being the Red Rose symbol of Lancashire, the very county at the centre of the action). Rashly, she accepts the app, which begins offering her solutions to her problems. In severe debt, she finds a huge amount of money in her bank account, but the App also starts insisting she snogs another girl’s boyfriend, which rapidly alienates her from her friends. There is a distinct be careful what you wish for message involved throughout the show as Red Rose favours come at a truly terrible cost. The app gets rather aggressive and vengeful if its instructions are ignored, and there seem to be ghostly events occurring too, (though the overtly supernatural elements are later quietly shelved in favour of a conspiratorial group of internet hackers organising the sinister events). There is a dramatic shift of central characters early in the series as a secondary friend is suddenly made the principal target for Red Rose, and her friends become aware of the App’s insidious powers, uniting to take on the forces of darkness together. If there is one thing a criminal conspiracy should fear more than the cops it is a group of angry teenagers. The script and performances are as sharp as razor blades, and being from Manchester and having done my university time in Bolton, the locations are very familiar to me. The fourth episode has a great element of humour when the heroes are obliged to leave the comfort of Bolton and take a train ride into Manchester city centre to gather vital information, treating the whole expedition like an ominous journey to downtown Mordor. There is a distinct sense of ‘We don’t have to go there do we’ shock for everyone as they go. A few elements weaken the plot. One character is drawn to the landmark Elizabethan Smithhills Hall (a major tourist attraction in Bolton), where she is relentlessly pursued by a deadly Red Rose assigned assailant, but everyone gets in and out with zero sign of security at the historic house. One of the protagonists is able to hack into the Red Rose tech, but makes no back up copies of its activity as evidence for the authorities who could easily take down the whole evil operation. What really works is the characterization and chemistry of interaction by the cast. When anyone gets into danger you are left genuinely concerned for them and the effect it will have on their friends. The reactions to bizarre and often deadly twists and turns are very apt for the young people we are watching. There are moments of extraordinary humour. One character breaks into a church to try to exorcise her own cell phone. There are also some clever misleading wrap ups, as when everything seems fully resolved by the end of season five, with the last three episodes coming on like an instant sequel to the rest, and fortunately the story is still open to a follow up. Weaknesses - the ghosts (in the machine, or actual apparitions) seen in the first two episodes are simply written out, Red Rose would draw lot of attention to itself, and the sudden introduction of two villains unseen previously in the second half of the finale gives us no time to really relate to them. Often when a character is threatened it is just a case of seeing the race against time by the others to reach them and save them in time, but the performers actually make you give a damn about who they are playing, and there is a great insight throughout into teenage anxieties, exam pressure, mental health tensions, the fear of not being liked and not fitting in. The relationship with their families, (with one broken marriage raging round the main protagonist being very central to the action and outcome of events) All of this is what Red Rose feeds on and threatens to undermine. The mistake it makes is messing with Northerners and angsty teens. It never really stands a chance. Arthur Chappell