40

I found `40' to be a very interesting piece of television. Maybe a tad too deliberately calculating in the way it was written, it kept me hooked all the way along. Excitingly directed, well photographed and brilliantly acted. Superb all round.

Reading the comments written so far I must have missed something as I found "40" to be one of the worst channel four programmes I've ever seen. The story was incomprehensible and totally unbelievable. As for some of the acting and dialogue, I couldn't believe what I was hearing, it was pitiful. It made "Neighbours" seem like Shakespeare! I know we're a bit spoilt with brilliant shows like "The Sopranos", "Six Feet Under" and "The West Wing" but this was not up to broadcasting standards and should have been left well on the shelf. (0/10)

a very pleasant surprise. once u start watching you're hooked. well filmed, good plot. very well acted and superb casting. each episode works as a separate story told from a different perspective. it's more like a thriller or a detective miniseries, but much more entertaining and glamorous. editing is fragmentary which is a bonus. all the separate life stories fit in perfectly together as a beautiful puzzle. quite a of cliché's used but that doesn't flatten the plot. some stunningly beautiful people performs a lot of stunningly beautiful dialogues. an overall thumbs up and more! hope they will do a rerun of it on the BBC. as of august 2005 it is still commercially unavailable.

"40" is a very modern multi-perspective television drama, with plenty of hand-held camera work and rapid cross-cutting between scenes, telling its story in the minimalist fashion favoured by writers such as Tony Marchant (the stylistic resemblances to "Holding On", in particular, are clear). It features one neat trick that takes advantage of its economical style, in that it's actually slightly less compact than it seems: having been shown one selection of scenes, we subsequently return to the same events and see a slightly, but revealingly, different selection. At one level this is entirely bogus: as the different versions of the story do not correspond with the viewpoints of any particular character, the choice of what to show where is arbitrary and contrived. But it feels "natural" while you are watching it; at least, the handling of the plot is in keeping with the overall form of the work. In that sense, "40" can be considered a qualified success.

But ultimately the tale, though neatly done, falls slightly flat. Crucially, a lot of things happen but to little greater purpose: the particular details of each incident, even the showpiece school reunion, tend to feel little more than purely incidental. The lives of the characters are too disconnected to make a really satisfying whole: there's no real focus here, simply events. The actual story of each individual, meanwhile, doesn't really add up to much; and whole it is nice to see Joanne Whalley back on British television, her character, Jess, remains a mystery to us. Ultimately, a more traditional drama, with a closer affinity to fewer characters, and a less trendily efficient style, might have allowed a deeper story to emerge.

"40" isn't bad, but it seems to fit a paradigm for how to make television in 2003, namely, sketch several stories in outline only, then mix up their pieces and hide the thin treatment of each behind the breadth of the whole. This can work, as "Holding On" showed; but that serial had more depth and a unifying mood. "40" has neither. In a few years time, it will surely show it's age.