Sex, Chips and Rock n Roll (1999)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Written by Debbie Horsfield
Directed by John Woods
Starring Gillian Kearney, Emma Cook, Sue Johnston, Phil Daniels, James Callis

Features:

• Cast Biographies
  
• 1965 Top 10 Music Chart
  
• Interactive Trivia
  

Ellie and Arden Brookes (Kearney and Cook respectively) have grown up in a very domineering household in the turbulent sixties and they couldn't be any more different. After all, they were raised by their grandmother, Irma (Johnston) because their single father, Howard (Nicholas Farrell) was too busy trying to earn a living for his twin daughters. Finally, their eighteenth birthday has arrived. Ellie has ambitions of attending university and Arden has dreams of being the next Marilyn Monroe. Everything would be just absolutely rosy if Ellie hadn't have gotten herself engaged to family friend Norman (David Threlfall), and Arden hadn't found out about a talent contest that could be her one-way ticket to the big life in London. To make matters worse, they both meet and fall in love with the same member of the backup band. Their story leads them through a possessively destructive fiance, an illegitimate pregnancy, and the inconsistent world of being with the band on the road.

This has to be one of the best pieces of screenwriting that I have seen in a long time. You fall instantly in love with the characters that you are supposed to fall in love with, and they allow you to fall in love with some of the characters that you wind up wanting to squash like a bug. And man, what a ride. I was literally on the edge of my seat until the very last minute of the show. I found myself feeling like I could not get the next DVD in the machine fast enough. Not one member of the cast is weak. I instantly adored both Ellie and Arden. They really created a sense of naivete and eagerness to get on with their lives.

Perhaps the best member of the cast, though, is Farrell. He has a relatively small part, but he just draws you in with his character--and his relationship with his mother is absolutely heart-wrenching. For those of you who don't recognize the name, he was Horatio in Kenneth Brannagh's Hamlet. Memorize the name because you really should find out everything he's been in and watch it. The real stars of the show--above all others--are Joseph McFadden and Julian Kerridge. They play two members of the band that start out by flipping a coin to see which one of the sisters that they would score with that first night. The actors really did their homework with these characters. While outwardly, they seem to be playing the stereotype of the 60's British rock-and-roll band members, inwardly, they knew that in order for the story to be compelling, they had to make their characters human. I can't tell you how refreshing that is to see.

The DVD presentation is one of the best that I've seen for a BBC series, but it's still not what they could be. I'll start with the small stuff: The Cast Biographies are pretty much the same as you see on every BBC DVD. They are simply text on-screen bits for all the cast members. This is also true of the "1965 Top Music Chart". It is simply text on screen of the top 10 singles of 1965. Interesting for trivia's sake, but nothing that you can't look up in the internet.

The best feature of this DVD--unlike most discs out there--is the Interactive Trivia game. What makes it so interesting is the difficulty level of the questions they ask. Given, I'm not up on what is now considered "oldies" music trivia, but these questions really made me stop and think before I gave my answers and I still wound up getting most of them wrong.

One seemingly obvious thing lacking on the DVD that is small, perhaps, but odd: there's no way to simply play all the episodes on a disc at once. You have to keep coming back to the main menu to play the next episode. Again, not a big issue, but since there are six episodes, it got a little old after a bit. On the whole, though, the BBC is heading in the right direction with this presentation. Still, though, the show itself makes up for anything that's missing from the discs themselves--that's why I recommend adding this one to your collection.