Our Girl Review

Our take on BBC1's latest one-off Sunday drama...
It's very easy when so many dramas these days fall flat to enter the trap of writing off BBC1 singular dramas such as Our Girl. Indeed, this reviewer's expectations of this modern-day one-off outing starring Lacey Turner weren't exactly high when it broadcast yesterday evening. Nevertheless, what we received instead turned out to be a personal and compelling 90 minute insight into life in the Armed Forces.

At first, there was plenty of potential for Our Girl to be nothing more than a rags-to-'riches' style programme that utilized many of the same assets seen in other dramas starring the likes of Turner. This wasn't the case at all, however: while the first 15-20 minutes of the piece were fairly familiar in presenting a conflicted family (featuring unexpected pleasant cameos from Derek's Kerry Godliman), once we began to glimpse Molly's transformation into a soldier of sorts, it all became much more relevant. Contrasting this teenage girl's life when enlisted in the harsh world of the British Army to her growing sense of alienation from the home and society she thought she knew, writer Tony Grounds certainly grounded the storyline in a definitive setting representative of the personal conflict many of those who've come from poor backgrounds and then fought must feel today.

However, this reviewer did eventually come to wonder whether Our Girl's biggest strength later developed into something more detrimental. While the contrast between Molly Dawes' personal and military life worked well at first in highlighting the rather shallow nature of a consumer-focused and benefit-driven society such as that of (parts of) North London, during the second half it couldn't help but seem as if an illogical distraction from the opportunity to further explore the impact life in the Armed Forces can have on an individual. There were times where the pseudo-patriotism of the piece bordered on mirroring the content of the Army Ads we see in cinema screenings these days, yet there would have been ample chance to dissipate this lingering sense of disconnection between the viewer and Molly by taking things in training a little slower and removing the focus from the family side of things. Indeed, this reviewer can't help but speculate as to whether Molly actually being the woman who bit the proverbial bullet in the episode's climax would have had a more substantial impact than the ambiguous ending that was used, clearly intended to emphasize the emotional strain on the unawares Dawes family at home.

I certainly wouldn't want to leave you with any strongly negative perceptions around Our Girl, though. This is by far one of the best one-off BBC1 dramas I've seen from the channel in a fair while, and although there was perhaps an overbearing sentimentality to it all, writer Grounds did achieve the clear goal of broadening our understanding of those who join the Armed Forces with vigour and aplomb. However, the final word must go to Lacey Turner, an as-ever brilliant actress who conveyed with ease Molly's personal conflict and as a result made Our Girl a little joy to watch.
4/5