logo
‘Better than the Godfather': The Red Riding Trilogy comes to Netflix, 15 years after its TV debut

‘Better than the Godfather': The Red Riding Trilogy comes to Netflix, 15 years after its TV debut

Telegraph5 days ago
The Red Riding Trilogy is now on Netflix. Read that as both a recommendation and a warning. On the one hand, Red Riding – a three-film adaptation of David Peace's four novels, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, released on Channel 4 in 2009 – is an undoubted high watermark of modern British television. But on the other, it is a dark (and, to these eyes, wonderful) night of the soul.
Red Riding is a story of crime and police corruption in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s. It dibs and dabs from real life, building a sustained, diseased epic that sets the Yorkshire Ripper murders alongside a set of (fictional) child abductions and killings.
When it was released in 2009 it came with an august cinematic pedigree. Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) adapted the screenplays, and three directors also better known for their work in cinema were assigned one film each: Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited), James Marsh (Man on Wire) and Anand Tucker (And When Did You Last See Your Father?)
The acting talent was equally illustrious. In the first film, The Year of Our Lord 1974, Andrew Garfield, who had just won a Bafta for his role in Boy A, starred as a young crime journalist on the case of a group of missing schoolgirls – one of them turned up with swan's wings literally stitched on to her back. The right people in Hollywood were paying attention: Garfield would go on to major stardom, including the plum gig of Spider-Man and being twice Oscar-nominated for Best Actor in Hacksaw Ridge and Tick, Tick Boom!
In the second, The Year of Our Lord 1980, the superb Paddy Considine played a Manchester detective conducting an internal investigation into the team working the Ripper case. And in the last, The Year of Our Lord 1983, Mark Addy portrayed a local solicitor representing a young man with extreme learning difficulties (a young Daniel Mays) who was imprisoned for the child murders in the first film. Addy went on to star in Game of Thrones. Mays has appeared in everything from Line of Duty to the recent Bookish.
The supporting cast, meanwhile, was as strong an ensemble as television could muster, pre-streamer: Lesley Sharp, Rebecca Hall, David Morrissey, Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Maxine Peake, Jim Carter and Peter Mullan, for starters. Sean Harris (Mission: Impossible) inevitably turns up for some added horror.
It is arguably the best British ensemble cast ever put together for television, and in the actors attracted to Grisoni's scripts and Peace's source material, Red Riding showed that TV was just as worthy of any A-Lister's attention as movies. Since 2009, of course, any qualitative distinction between a television and a film actor has all but disappeared.
Grisoni's scripts took Peace's dazzling, intense poetry and used the extended duration of television to give it some structure. Many novels have been deemed unfilmable, but Red Riding, a fractured, hallucinatory narrative in print, showed that with pacing, screen time and the right script, huge projects that spent years scaring writers (and executives) off could work on television.
When it was first broadcast, Red Riding was labelled 'a place so dark even Darth Vader would have trouble going there' in these pages. David Thomson in The New York Review of Books wrote, 'Red Riding is better than The Godfather, but it leaves you feeling so much worse.' The New York Times said it was a place 'where men and terror run wild, and beauty exists only in the cinematography and some of the performances.
'The blood that runs through the 'Red Riding' trilogy,' an unsure review continued, 'begins as a river that races and then rages until it floods this dank, dark, pitiless world in misery.'
But Mark Addy probably summed it up best, with: 'Yeah, it's not an advert for tourism in Yorkshire.'
A cheery sofa-snuggler for you and all the family, this undoubtedly isn't. But as a televisual equivalent of a Bacon triptych, as a nihilistic vision that reaches out from the small screen and envelops like a cold sweat, Red Riding was way ahead of its time. True Detective, HBO's 2014 crime drama, substituted Yorkshire for the US deep south, but followed Red Riding's sense of a Dantean descent through the circles of hell. Unsurprisingly, True Detective's creator Nic Pizzolatto turned out to be a Red Riding fan.
This sense of regional gothic and the marauding weirdness of local cultural traditions (leading to the matchless line, 'This is the North, where we do what we want') then spread across television, from Hans Rosenfeldt's The Bridge (2011) to Netflix's Ozark (2017). It has become, in some ways, the dominant theme in all TV thrillers — if you want to freak them out, take them to a place that's the same, but different.
However, the success of this strategy relies almost entirely on convincing atmospherics, and again this is where Red Riding was a game changer. While James Marsh's middle episode was shot on 35mm film, the first and third films were on the Red One digital camera, first introduced in 2007. It allowed similar quality to 35mm, but was also highly effective in low, natural light. It soon became the gold standard for realism, but Red Riding was one of the first to bring that gritty intensity. And it worked: in the US, the series was released in cinemas as a 305-minute feature, and it still looks sensational in HD on your ginormous flatscreen today.
Yet if you're reading all of this and thinking that unremitting gloom isn't what you're looking for in 2025 (perhaps because there's gloom enough in the real world to make a Hey Duggee binge a preferable choice), there are two things to note.
One is that the series has never felt more pertinent, bearing in mind what has happened to mainstream politics on both sides of the Atlantic in the intervening years.
'I think it's about the sense that [it's not possible] to be a little bit corrupt,' said David Morrissey at the time. 'It's like being a little bit pregnant. If you're corrupt, you're corrupt… It's like there's no such thing as a small war. There are consequences.'
Secondly, Red Riding is not inhumane. It pushed the boundaries but it was also one of the first series to ask what was too dark and where to draw the line, particularly regarding the young, female body count. Liza Marshall, the then- Channel 4 head of drama, who commissioned the programme, said at the time: 'There is an audience for dark crime, but I think we needed to pull back a little bit from some of the extreme darkness. I just couldn't countenance watching that many hours of television… and then, in the end, it's all really bleak.'
As such, Grisoni's adaptation actually turned down the darkness dial from Peace's merciless novels – the final film includes a coda that is not in the books and offers at least a glimpse of redemption.
'It was an emotional reaction to the material,' Grisoni said. 'An emotional reaction to two and a half years of being in this inferno that David Peace had constructed. David doesn't save anyone. Whereas I needed to.'
A final note: there is one further mystery that comes with the Red Riding trilogy. As you'll have noticed, there were four novels, but only three films. Grisoni wrote a full screenplay for 1977, but budgetary constraints meant it was never made.
So go on Netflix – this is the North, after all, where you can do what you want.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Emmerdale star reveals secret struggles with 'misunderstood' neurodivergent condition
Emmerdale star reveals secret struggles with 'misunderstood' neurodivergent condition

Daily Mirror

time9 hours ago

  • Daily Mirror

Emmerdale star reveals secret struggles with 'misunderstood' neurodivergent condition

EXCLUSIVE: Emmerdale star Simon Haines has opened up on his struggles with dyspraxia, which is feels is a 'misunderstood' condition. Emmerdale star Simon Haines has opened up on his struggles with dyspraxia. ‌ The actor, who played Owen Michaels on the ITV soap, was previously diagnosed with the neurodivergent condition that causes difficulties with movement and co-ordination. He said he just tries to be 'open and honest' about his struggles when it comes to working on a television set. ‌ In an exclusive chat with the Mirror, he said: "It probably is the more rare sort of thing [to meet] fellow dyspraxics, and it always kind of pops up in an unexpected way. People are like 'Oh, me too!' ‌ "So I guess for me it's really important to be open and out there because people do have this experience of being like 'Oh cool, I'm not the only one!' Simon has experienced various 'challenges' when it comes to working as an actor due to his condition, noting: "But yeah the challenges, I guess for me, are definitely...I'm so easily disorientated when I'm walking around a set. "So we'll wrap on a scene and they're like 'Great, you can go back to the green room' or whatever and I'm like 'I have no idea whether to turn left or right...'" The soap star, who was killed off in a recent episode of the Yorkshire-based show at the hands of John Sugden (Oliver Farnworth), described the condition as 'misunderstood' and even had to pay for his diagnosis. He said: "My school didn't even spot it. I spotted it myself. When I was 21 at Cambridge doing an English degree, and a friend of mine told me he'd been diagnosed as dyslexic. ‌ "I was like 'How is that possible?' But then I started looking into some of the symptoms [of dyspraxia] and thought that sounded a bit like me. I had to pay for my own diagnosis because the uni would've been hopeless. Dyspraxia is thought to affect as much as 10% of the population, including a number of high-profile celebrities like Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe and Florence and the Machine frontwoman Florence Welch. Tasks requiring balance, playing sports or learning to drive a car can be a challenge for sufferers. Dyspraxia can also impact on fine motor skills, such as writing or using small objects. But, ultimately, Simon, who will soon be seen starring alongside Hollywood actor Glen Powell in a remake of Stephen King's The Running Man, is pleased that he received the diagnosis despite the lack of resources. ‌ He continued: "The diagnosis was super helpful to just have the label and to sort of have a gentler relationship with myself and the difficulties I'm having with things like maps and navigation. But there aren't a lot of resources out there." There is no exact reason why people get dyspraxia 'but it is thought to be caused by a disruption in the way messages from the brain are transmitted to the body. 'This affects a person's ability to perform movements in a smooth, coordinated way, as explained on the Dyspraxia Foundation website. ‌ Sometimes if a child is born prematurely they may be at higher risk of developing dyspraxia. Studies have also shown that dyspraxia is more common in men than women and can often run in the family. Some of the signs of dyspraxia are explained on the NHS website. The effects can vary between individuals and will change over time. Since his short stint on Emmerdale, Simon has loved tuning back in but admitted that it was all a 'surreal experience' to have been on the set in the first place and suddenly finding himself suddenly standing in iconic locations, including the soap's famous pub. He added: "It was definitely a surreal experience being on set and in the village, probably the coolest thing was, I shot in The Hide, and was chatting to our director Eamonn Norris. He's saying 'Yeah, why don't you look at the other sets?' "And I just walked through a door and suddenly I'm in Home Farm! That was totally iconic. It's been nice tuning back in now after not having watched for a while and seeing that Kim's back, Charity and Chaz are there, they've all got grandkids, these people who seem like they were really young. I think the strangest thing was walking into The Woolpack. Yeah, there's no Woolpack i there. It's just an empty space really!"

Why TV dance star made last-minute withdrawal from live show
Why TV dance star made last-minute withdrawal from live show

The Independent

time11 hours ago

  • The Independent

Why TV dance star made last-minute withdrawal from live show

Janette Manrara, a former Strictly Come Dancing professional, was forced to pull out of a live performance of the musical Chicago on Wednesday, 23 July. Manrara is currently starring as Roxie Hart in the UK tour of Chicago, which is performing at Blackpool's Winter Gardens. She announced on Instagram that she was "unwell" and needed to rest to recover quickly, expressing deep apologies to the audience. Manrara reassured fans that she is "on the mend" and hopes to return to the stage soon, praising the rest of the cast for their performance. Since leaving her professional dancing role on Strictly in 2021, Manrara has co-presented the spin-off show It Takes Two.

Where to watch the ‘One Night in Idaho' documentary
Where to watch the ‘One Night in Idaho' documentary

The Independent

time11 hours ago

  • The Independent

Where to watch the ‘One Night in Idaho' documentary

On 13 November 2022, the tight-knit community in the Idaho town of Moscow were left reeling after the murder of four college students. University of Idaho undergraduates Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, were stabbed to death at their home in the middle of the night. Their two other roommates, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen, were the only people in the house to survive. After a seven-week manhunt, the now-convicted mass murderer Bryan Kohberger was found at his family home. For three years, he professed his innocence before switching his plea to avoid the death penalty, just weeks before he was due to stand trial. The police revealed little about the investigation owing to a gag order in place, which was lifted by the judge ahead of the sentencing. But many questions remain unanswered, including the motivations behind his attack. In a bid to put the victims and their families front and centre, directors Liz Garbus and Matthew Galkin have made a four-part documentary titled One Night in Idaho: The College Murders. It follows the family and friends of the victims in the aftermath and explores the impact of social media sleuths during high-profile cases. Here's everything you need to know about it, including where to stream. What is 'One Night in Idaho: The College Murders' about? The four-part series recounts the night of the murders, where four students were stabbed in their off-campus house in the quiet town of Moscow. Exploring the aftermath of the killings, it features the grieving family, friends and wider community. The documentary features exclusive interviews with Stacey and Jim Chapin (parents of Ethan Chapin), and Karen and Scott Laramie (parents of Madison Mogen), none of whom have previously been interviewed about the murders. The directors of the series – Liz Garbus and Matthew Galkin – wanted to shake up the true crime format by putting the victims at the forefront, rather than the suspect. Across four episodes, One Night in Idaho also explores the impact and damage of internet sleuths who became obsessed with the case, some of whom attempted to sneak into the University's classes and dorms, and others even into the roped-off house. Where to watch 'One Night in Idaho' in the UK All four episodes of One Night in Idaho are now available on Amazon Prime Video. If you're not already a member, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial. After that, a Prime membership costs £8.99 per month or £95 per year. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Prime Video alone for £5.99 per month.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store