(un)Happy Shopper
Siege review
Production company – BBC
Rating – 
Another short story from the Limelight series on BBC Radio 4, that brought you the previously reviewed podcasts The System, The House the Vanished, Who Is Aldridge Kemp, Firewall and others. From that list, you can see that this series has some big shoes to fill.
Will this series be on a par with Aldrich Kemp, or will it leave me unsatisfied like The House That Vanished? I’m not going to tell you this early on am I? You’ll have to read to the end to find that out.
So what’s it about?
Siege is an interesting take on a hostage drama, told from the perspective of interviews with the hostages themselves after the event. Actually, the term interview isn’t entirely accurate. There are no questions here, just the hostages giving their accounts of what happened, answering unheard questions. This is quite a good idea in practice.
Over the course of 5 episodes, you are on a gripping ride of what should have been a day just like any other, but one that went awry very quickly. What starts as a robbery at a supermarket, becomes a hostage situation after the security shutters fall, and the shoppers are left trapped with the armed robber.
Where the writing really shines is when the same event is told from multiple perspectives. For example, right at the beginning of the siege, the schoolgirl Naomi puts her headphones in and listens to music, quietly singing along. “Aunty” Kemi is busy praying, sees Naomi and thinks she’s praying too, and is even speaking in tongues. This opens the way for the two of them to connect with each other without actually understanding each other completely.
One of the points of the story is that a disparate group of people get stuck together and their prejudices and misunderstanding get put to one side, although the interviews give an insight into their real feelings about the various events of the story.
As the interviews continue, certain masks start to slip and you realise that people’s lives are never as perfect as they’d like you to think at first. Penny’s story is particularly well written, and well acted.
Is it any good?
This is a masterclass in how to make a gripping series with very limited resources. There’s no over the top sound effects, or big musical scores. Just five brilliant voice actors telling a story for the most part (towards the end of the series, a new character, Derek the security guard gets to tell his story).
In fact, the only thing I didn’t really like was the glitchy music that got played between each “scene”. It was jarring and unnecessary, in my opinion at least. As I write this though, I wonder if there was some meaning that I’ve missed for it, although I have gone through the whole thing twice. Maybe I’m not paying as much attention as I should be!
Final thoughts
This series is well worth your time. You can easily get through it in a day should you wish. The story is very well written, and brilliantly acted. It’s a refreshing take on a crime drama, even with the obligatory twist at the end.
You may find the characters somewhat “tropey”, and they are. I don’t think you can really escape that in a drama such as this though. The story demands it. They are so well portrayed though, that it’s easy to overlook this.
You can get Siege here: