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2014 British TV series or programme From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
37 Days is a British drama miniseries that was first broadcast on BBC Two from 6 to 8 March 2014. The three-part miniseries covers the 37 days before World War I, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on 28 June 1914 to the United Kingdom declaring war on Germany on 4 August 1914.[1]
| 37 Days | |
|---|---|
| |
| Genre | Drama |
| Written by | Mark Hayhurst |
| Directed by | Justin Hardy |
| Composer | Andrew Simon McAllister |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 3 |
| Production | |
| Producers |
|
| Cinematography | Douglas Hartington |
| Editor | Adam Green |
| Running time | 177 minutes |
| Production company | Hardy Pictures |
| Original release | |
| Network | |
| Release | 6 March – 8 March 2014 |
The series was shot entirely in Belfast, Northern Ireland.[2] It is part of the BBC World War I centenary season and was first announced by Janice Hadlow, the controller of BBC Two, on 22 August 2013.[3] The series seeks to quash assumptions about the war's inevitability, such as the Sarajevo shooting making the war inevitable.[4][5]
Writer and producers Mark Hayhurst and Sue Horth compiled a 175-page book tracing "every conference, every telephone call, private letter and telegram swirling around Europe" before writing the script.[6]
| No. | Title | Directed by | Written by | Original air date | UK viewers (millions) [7] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "One Month in Summer" | Justin Hardy | Mark Hayhurst | 6 March 2014 | 2.89 |
| 2 | "One Week in July" | Justin Hardy | Mark Hayhurst | 7 March 2014 | 2.14 |
| 3 | "One Long Weekend" | Justin Hardy | Mark Hayhurst | 8 March 2014 | 1.84 |
The series was positively reviewed by critics.
In a four-star review for The Times, Andrew Billen called the series "a clear and often brilliant dramatisation" and praised McDiarmid's portrayal of Grey as "surely one of the actor's greatest performances" though he found "the humour becomes slightly broader" in the scenes set in Berlin and Vienna and that the subplot of the two clerks "rather peters out".[8]
In a four of five-star review for The Telegraph, Christopher Howse found the series "enthralling" but was distracted by the use of the Belfast City Hall as a location for Whitehall.[9]
Andrew Anthony of The Guardian called the series a "meticulous rendering" and "impressively wordy and careful imagining" free of "romantic digressions or fictional appeals to sentiment", with a "strong performance" by McDiarmid; he also found the drama "rigid and simplistic" with "dubious stereotypes and an excess of rhetorical dialogue".[10]
In The Independent, Ellen Jones wrote the series' "masterstroke" was "to reframe this history textbook timeline as a subtle character study", praising its "terrifically well written" dialogue.[11]
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