Freefall - BBC2 drama on the financial catastrophe

[TonyGosling]

BBC2 Making great drama out of a credit crisis
on later this summer

Art usually lags behind life, but one of Britain's leading directors has already made what promises to be the defining TV event of the credit crunch. The brilliant drama, Freefall, is a searing exploration of the financial and moral fallout of economic collapse - and one of a growing number of examples of how culture is reflecting the times

....Freefall has three plotlines. We follow Gus (Aidan Gillen), an icy-hearted and dysfunctional banker high on deals, whose work life is about to follow his private life into collapse as the financial system seizes up; Dave (Dominic Cooper), a mortgage salesman who ruthlessly sells dreams to the aspirational poor; and Jim (Joseph Mawle), a shopping mall security guard, who falls for Dave's patter and buys an executive home for his young family, with disastrous consequences. His actors' research - Savage introduced them to real-life counterparts with whom they subsequently had to spend time - and their improvised lines give the narrative, which otherwise might seem over-expository, a sickly momentum. So, too, does the fact that, in the case of some smaller roles - the estate agent who tries to flog Jim his new home; the debt collector who phones his wife as the family fall behind on their payments - we are watching not actors but people who really do these jobs. It is gripping and moving. "It wasn't an easy process," says Mawle, who spent three evenings with a Hadfield security guard, Dave. "For some scenes the takes were 45 minutes long. Altogether Dominic filmed 100 hours of stuff. But for me it was incredibly thought-provoking. The film tries to capture our sense of entitlement. Our aspirations are now so high they're beyond the reach of most ordinary people, yet still it's perpetuated that everybody has both the ability and the right to have a part of this life. Playing Jim, it became clear to me that he would have been far happier had his aspirations been left quietly sleeping."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/may/10/freefall-drama-tv-econom ic-collapse