User reviews

Big fan of UK dramas , but this was lacking big time. Not much of a plot or point for that matter and I got sooo sick of hearing "Mr Petrukhin". Actors were great ,cinematography was great , just a poor story.

The writing is unbelievably bad, and the direction worse. Here you have a very fine cast of actors, in possession of a decent plot, being made to look wooden and/or hammy by really atrocious writing and utterly incompetent direction

Just finished watching summer of something,wow,what a stinker,the person who wrote this drivel had no clue what story he wanted to tell,is it about a struggling businessman who's coerced by the goverment into spying?is it a story about his imbecile daughter hannah who's moving through the summer of 1958 like a bull in a china shop?(the actress who's playing hannah is terrible),is it a story about a distraught mum who's trying to find what had happened to her missing son?i usually like keeley hawes,she is an excellent actress,but here she's completely unconvincing,there are more questions and stupid subplots,but you get the idea,and what about the answers?well, forget about the answers,this series is an exercise in futility,nothing more, there are two positives in this series,the first is toby stephens,he is absolutely brilliant,the second,if you pay attention,you can hear cliff richard and the shadows playing 'move it' on the radio(twice i think),such a breath of fresh air in a very dull,dreary series.

Apparently the writer and director is well known for his stage plays and it shows ...

This is like watching a 1940/50's film thats been coloured with lashings of lemonade.

If the scenery moved it would be equaled only by Acorn Antiques and the Biorb fish tank from episode one seems to have travelled back in time from the 21st Century.

So much of this seems to hinge on the importance of one of the inventions of Samuel Petrukhin (Toby Stephens) that, if you can't follow the logic of why such an invention is critical to a certain group of people, you will struggle to suspend your disbelief.

People behave as if they're all together in a sort of "pocket universe"; the outside world is still going on outside, but it only impinges when it helps support the fragile plot. (Perhaps that is a problem with all drama, but it feels a particular problem here.)

One other thing that's hard to swallow: professional people behave in such incredibly amateurish ways.

At times, this felt very much like it had been made for children, since I think you need a child's logic-defying imagination to really be able to enjoy this.

Well filmed and great attention to period detail but the plot so slow and uninteresting, acting is poor and to be fair the actors have not been given much to work with. I was Kid in the 50's and don't recall all this worry about the bomb. Obviously written by someone who did not do their reseach very well. Don't bother unless you have troble sleeping.