Review: Save Me
DVD: Save Me (2018)
Save Me is a six-part British television drama serial, written by and starring Line of Duty & The Walking Dead’s Lennie James. The series stars James as Nelson ‘Nelly’ Rowe, an alcoholic scumbag, who wriggles out of sticky situations with his charm and whose life is turned upside down when Jody, the daughter he fathered thirteen years ago but has had nothing to do with, mysteriously disappears.
Had Save Me been airing weekly on BBC1 at 9pm on a Sunday night, it would have been equal to The Night Manager or Doctor Foster in its impact. However, hidden away on Sky Atlantic I think a lot of people will miss this excellent series. You can’t wait to see where it will go next. It’s an acting masterclass and has the best British talent around; Stephen Graham plays a convicted paedophile with a twist, Suranne Jones is Jody’s mother, long estranged from Nelly and now married to some sort of crooked millionaire in trouble with drug dealers, Jason Flemyng is Tammy, a cross dresser, even the periphery cast are excellent. And despite being only 6 episodes long, the strength of the series, apart from the acting and writing, is that each of the main characters are fully rounded with enough time spent with them so you care about them, are invested in them and are eager to know the outcome of their story.
It’s a simple tale; Nelly, a pissed up chancer and a serial shagger of any woman he can bed is suddenly arrested for complicity in the disappearance of his own absent daughter, but he’s been set up. Jody has been lured away from home with the promise of meeting her real dad and eating some of her granny’s salt fish dumplings. So the quest begins to find Jody and bring her home.
It’s grim viewing with a lot of suppressed menace connected to child abuse, rape, abduction. We see Melon (Graham) whose degree of paedophilia is constantly toyed with in our minds and that of his wife, Bernie. Is he really searching the dark web as a favour to Nelly, to find Jody or does he still watch child porn? This is one of Graham’s most wonderful performances; he makes you believe he’s innocent, then… not. Is he? Isn’t he? I still don’t know.
Lennie James is quite extraordinary for not only writing this, but starring in it, reigning in his anger, pathetically shallow and self-serving, violent, pissed and yet charming.
A genuinely unmissable series and a stone cold classic of UK TV.
Save Me is released on 7th May 2018 and you can buy it by clicking HERE. ALL money raised by purchasing from Amazon via our website is given back to our listeners and followers in upcoming competition prizes. The more people buy, the bigger our prizes.
Review by Tina (co-host of 60 Minutes With) from discs kindly supplied by Aim Publicity.
