I was a huge Poliakoff fan. Shooting the Past is one of my all time favourite TV dramas! I have found the quality of the plot of his BBC dramas has been deteriorating since then. I couldn't even watch Close to the Enemy (but that was mainly due to the dreadful acting!). I did enjoy the first 2-3 episodes of Summer of Rockets, the cast is outstanding (especially young Sasha!), the locations are stunning (especially some of the party locations and the Shaw house) and the direction and production are very good. However...... Toby Stephens occasional Russian accent amongst his plum English accent is ridiculous (I didn't even notice it until about episode 3?!). The whole thing with the people locator/bleeper/pager brought out the pedant in me, especially the test at the hospital and when Sasha went missing when people said he needed one of the people locators so that they couldn't lose him. Even if Sasha was in possession of one he couldn't have been found unless he wanted to, surely?! It's not a GPS, at least that's not how it was presented in the plot, it is merely a paging device! And the whole veggie-going-missing Anthony plot line was a bit of a nonsense just to keep Mrs Shaw busy! Also the terribly Englishness of it all wore on me after a while. In summary, it looks glorious, and the cast are excellent (massive shout out to the wonderful Timothy Spall) but the plot won't fool anyone, there are some hideous American-style stating the obvious moments, and the script needed a lot more polishing before it went into production.
Review of Summer of Rockets
