Ascendancy (1983)

I usually make it a rule never to comment on domestic Irish politics - I think it's usually best to leave that to those who live on that particular Emerald Isle but given that, even I felt this drama rather over-simplified the problems facing the population after the Great War had raged on the continent. This story is told through the increasingly troubled eyes of "Connie" (Julie Covington) - a member of the landed gentry - and focusses on the embryonic but burgeoning independence movement. The war has taken it's toll on not just the local - loyalist - population, but also on the British Empire itself and with the added issues of famine affecting the nation, an opportunity to break the colonial yoke appears to beckon. She, however, lives a comfortable life away from all these stresses behind the gates of her father's mansion. He (John Phillips) is a wealthy industrialist who is probably quite fair minded by the standards of the early 1920s, but who is being put in a series of difficult positions by his increasingly polarised, dare one even say sectarian, workforce. Unexpectedly, she encounters "Ryder" (Ian Charleson) - a recovering soldier who clearly has his own red mists to deal with, and through her association with him she finds herself drawn, philosophically at least, into the republican movement in a tangential but quite affecting way for her as her health begins to deteriorate and her grasp on reality begins to loosen. What help can her new friend be? Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for this soporific costume drama, but at no point did I actually feel invested in any of the characters nor in a storyline that ought to have been far more evocative than it was. It reminded me a lot of an episode of "Foyle's War" - only without the benefits of strong characterisations and challengeing writing. This is much more of a slowly paced soap that pitches the rich against the not-so-rich along some blandly stereotypical lines and although towards the conclusion I felt Covington did put the effort in, the rest of the cast just don't have enough to get their teeth into to make much headway into the contentious subject matter Edward Bennett and Nigel Gearing seem to want to explore with us. The whole production has the look of a television film to it, it's meandering and drearily scored and ultimately it had just too much of the wallpaper history about it.