Mr P has toned down his usual artificiality, created a time and place that more or less convinces and put together an exciting plot with a real dénouement. He deserves kudos for managing all this after many years of not doing so. Perhaps all the BBC money they have thrown in his direction has started to pay off at last. Toby Stephens is excellent, as is Keeley Hawes (as usual). Everyone else is good too and little Toby Woolf is a delight. There are faults. Yes, there is a coherent dénouement but it's not without clichés (one particularly egregious one involving guns) and some sickly sweetness. Adrian Edmondson's TV shows are embarrassingly unfunny. The subplots, while interesting, are in fact superfluous. There is the one about the missing son, which is included, I guess,to give Keeley Hawes and Clare Bloom things to do. The daughter's daft scenes at Buckingham Palace and the expensive ball with hordes of debs are also of only tangential relevance.
Review of Summer of Rockets
