I Am Not Alone

It seems I am not alone in my irritation with The Last Enemy.

Reading next week’s copy of the Radio Times, I can see that some people are so irritated by the programme that they have written into the magazine, whose letters page is normally filled with people saying that either a) the BBC is insulting Christianity and has an anti-God vendetta or b) the license fee (or, as they call it, the TV TAX) is a manifest of the Devil and should be abolished.

Hands up to all who made it through the first episode of The Last Enemy.

I didn’t have a clue what was going on, which was a problem, but I was able to discern a series of stilted scenes full of awkward dialogue and unlikely events, including the classic “two characters suddenly sleep together just because one of them’s a bit upset”. Everyone was very shady and mysterious; it was all so fragmented that I couldn’t summon the energy to discover what they were up to.

We’ve had conspiracy thrillers about politics, the media and nuclear power. For a long time, this seemed to be railing against the dead threat of people in leather gloves having conversations in cafes. And pity poor Benedict Cumberbatch, a fine actor lumbered with a clichéd character: a hermit-like mathematician who has to leave his cosy world of formulae and get his hands dirty, which will be difficult, as he obsessively washes his hands every five minutes!

Drama should grab your attention within minutes and make you intrigued to discover what happens next, but this programme seemed to go out of its way to annoy us into switching off.

Brian Wilkinson, Reading, Berks.

All perfectly valid and commendable points. But the next one takes a more technical (albeit very obvious) stance:

In two different dramas on successive nights – The Last Enemy [on Sundays] and The Palace [Mondays on ITV1] – an intruder was able to enter a principal character’s home, switch on their laptop and immediately gain access to the files therein. Neither character had set an ‘administrator’ password; since they were, respectively, an anally retentive mathematician and a private secretary to a reigning monarch, this lack of attention to basic IT security was incredible.

I can only conclude that the writers concerned have never used a PC and laboriously inscribe their scripts into an exercise book using a quill pen.

Edwin Smith

Even if no root password was set, or even (God forbid) no user password, the video app probably wouldn’t have started immediately when the laptop computer’s lid was opened. So it seems I’m not alone in my criticism.