FIONA’S STORY
Given the capacity of drama to allow people to empathise with others, one interesting question is who you choose as your protagonist. Which made Fiona’s Story particularly interesting, choosing as it did to understand a deeply unpleasant situation from the perspective not of its instigator, but his wife.
Gina McKee was brilliant as Fiona, the middle class mother whose life is thrown into turmoil when husband Simon (just as capably played by Jeremy Northam) is visited by the police regarding the download of images of child abuse. He blusters, stalls, claims that someone has swiped his credit card details, but there’s no getting away from it: Simon has done just what the police said he did. And Fiona has to deal with the implications and consequences of that.
To begin with, Fiona is in turmoil and confusion. She attends a nativity play and doesn’t hear a word, concentrating as she is on the impossibility of what the man she loves has done. And once she’s on that path, she can’t help ask other questions. Why exactly is it that she and Simon haven’t slept together for a year or more? Getting answers isn’t on the agenda though, because Simon has the upper hand, playing emotional games to manipulate Fiona and make her feel guilty. And he succeeds in that, setting her head spinning and feeling bad about herself instead of taking decisive action about her husband, who acts as if he’s done nothing wrong and is supported in that belief by the inconsequentiality of what happens when legal processes slowly creak into action.
Kate Gabriel’s script is strong in depicting Fiona’s erosion. She’s caught in a dismal situation, and in particular the question of whether Simon should be allowed access to their daughters. Simon’s injured face is immensely slappable in the scenes when he’s playing the good father, and his family aren’t much better. His brother pretty much accuses the police of political correctness gone mad for spoiling every man’s right to look at porn, and his mother writes off the situation as a midlife crisis.
No wonder Fiona turns to another man, in the form of the conductor of the choir she’s a member of. Simon is pitiful in his vitriol when he gets wind of this, and petty when he tells his daughters that their mother has a boyfriend. In short order, Simon has a girlfriend, and his daughters and their friends sleep over at weekends. Fiona is put under tremendous pressure, especially when she confides the truth to a friend, who understandably wants her own kids to be let nowhere near Simon.
Fiona’s Story was powerful television, intelligent and uncompromising. The only false note was struck by Simon’s brother and his defence of a man’s right to look at porn, which sounded a bit too much like a political stance than something a real human would come out with. But given the amount of research involved in a piece like this, it’s amazing how subtly written the overall script was.
Armando Iannucci has recently called for the BBC to launch a premium channel, a subject I have no fixed opinion on at this point, beyond thinking we’re already paying for what should be a premium service. And it’s dramas like Fiona’s Story that make a good case for keeping BBC1 just how it is, where everyone can see programmes of this calibre and importance.
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Aaron Wakling said,
September 1, 2008 @ 12:16 am
Great Blog post. I am going to bookmark and read more often. I love the Blog template … if you need any assistance customizing it let me know!
Adrian Reynolds said,
September 1, 2008 @ 3:17 am
See Aaron, I am torn. You say such lovely things, and yet your name links to a credit card website that has been sending me spam. Are you real, or spambot, with your kind but generic comments? If I took you up on your offer, would this site start to look like an American Express card? I fear it would…
Bingethink said,
September 3, 2008 @ 8:52 pm
Great Blog post. I am going to bookmark it and read it more often.
I quite liked Fiona’s Story, but not as much as you, I think.
My main problem with it was the passivity of Fiona. It made sense to me that she was standing by her man when she couldn’t be sure what he had done, but as soon as he had admitted to downloading all those images, I found it hard to believe she would get into bed with him, and not just bundle all her children up and drive away somewhere else, especially when we had already learned that their marriage was in trouble and they had sex once a year.
And there wasn’t much ambiguity to Jeremy Northam. As you say, the brother gave a supporting point-of-view that didn’t seem very real, or very convincing. There was never a point where I felt he was anything other than creepy and manipulative. So, I didn’t think Fiona really had any motivation to stay. If we saw that she loved him from the beginning, was still besotted by him, still wanted him sexually, it seems to me we would be exploring a richer dramatic situation. Or maybe it would have been interesting to have her meet the hot new girlfriend - did she really “not mind” that her new older man was under suspicion of downloading child porn? That’s an interesting character to start with.
The other problem that loomed large with me was the (possibly directorial?) decision to set it in what must have been at least a million-pound house (and Granny’s country pad must have cost more than that) and still retain lines about being short of money, and not being able to afford the mortgage. I know there are economic pressures that women feel in getting out of abusive domestic situations, but that didn’t sit easily with the Ideal Home lifestyle they lived. If leaving your child-abuse-collecting husband meant taking your children to live in a women’s refuge or on the street, then you might be racked with an aawful dilemma. If leaving your child-abuse-collecting creepy husband meant downsizing from a million pound house to a half-million pound house then, not so much.
Adrian said,
September 3, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
You make good points about Fiona’s character and about the economics of the situation. All I can say is, love - even the remnants of love as in this case - can make people do some things that seem unusual to outsiders. Had Fiona had more of a life of her own, in the form of a career she is pursuing at least part of the time, or could return to, the dynamic between she and he would necessarily change. As for how he’s portrayed, the key there is in the title: this is Fiona’s Story.