TV Review: 'The Diary of Anne Frank'

Write the following down on your "To-Do" list - Watch The Diary of Anne Frank

I must take my hat off to the BBC for a thoroughly enjoyable drama series. Before I heap further praise on the programme itself, i'll take another hat off and bow it toward Geoff Breton, my friend from school who plays Peter Van Daan in the show. A cracking perfomance and it's good to finally see Geoff getting the praise and airtime he deserves because he's a bloody good actor.

If you haven't seen or heard of this dramatisation, the basic jist is a fleshing out of the actual text of the diary itself, using (I think) the diary itself to form a voice-over narration from Anne.

The setting of the annexe lends itself well to five shorter 30 minute mini-dramas rather than a huge slog of 2 hours in which we might have started to get a little claustrophobic in our seats. I think this is a great way for the major British networks to start releasing their dramas. All too often we get a huge chunk of a crime drama dumped at 9pm on ITV and can't be bothered to invest two hours of our lives without promise of a good show. And once we're an hour into it, we've missed all of our alternative programme choices, and have to stubbornly stick it out to the end when we already know the muderer is the vicar who dodged the police questions after ten minutes and who claimed the crimson blood on the chalice was the wine of christ and how dare they accuse christ of being a murderer. Case solved.

If we get drama in bite-size, we can have a little taster, see if we want to taste more, and then proceed as we wish. Plus it's so simple on BBC iPlayer to make these choices when you need to.

If you haven't already - go to the iPlayer, and watch 'The Diary of Anne Frank' - it's fantastic and moving and for the first time in a while, i'm proud of the BBC for producing some world-class television.

I'm also pretty proud of Geoff. I guess he's probably got lots of girls coming up to him in the street now, saying stuff like "Hey, aren't you that guy from Anne Frank, can I have your number? Can I put it in my diary?" Which would be a sick joke for a girl to make, but he probably goes along with it. He probably gets free drinks and free Armani suits. He probably has an entourage now with drivers and cooks and everything. He probably has people blogging about him and telling the whole world that they know a famous guy from the telly.

Some people are just plain lucky. Others blog.