Not another Promise

There’s quite a bit of hype about the upcoming eight-parter called The Honourable Woman to be aired starting Thursday on BBC2. It’s a drama/thriller  set against the background of the Israel Palestine conflict.

I can hear “Oh noes” erupting all around. Is it going to be another version of Peter Kosminsky’s ‘The Promise’, which purported to educate us about the history of the region as well as the modern day situation? Predictably Peter Kosminsky’s history was his story, as opposed to the actual story. His subsequent appearances on virulently anti-Israel discussion panels underlined what we already knew, but the unsuspecting audience did not.  So will  Hugo Blick’s offering be as bad as some of us fear?

One or two phrases that Alan of B-BBC has picked out from the press publicity  do not auger well.

The British protagonist’s father is a baddie - a Zionist gunrunner no less, so not a good start. The cryptic direction “Not too much sand” alludes to the fact that it will have to be dumbed down enough so that the UK audience can get their thick heads around it, and the warning “Don’t kill too many children” is too flippant a piece of advice for comfort. As Alan says, we’ll have to wait and see.