Greatest Days – Film Review
by Frank L

Director – Coky Giedroyc
Writer – Tim Firth
Stars – Aisling Bea, Matthew McNulty, Alice Lowe

Tim Firth adapted his own musical “The Band” along with director Coky Giedroc, to make this celebration of teenage friendship which, even with a long fallow period, blossoms again twenty-five years later in unlikely circumstances. It begins in the small Lancashire town of Clitheroe where five teenage girls are smitten by a boyband called simply but splendidly “The Boys” (played by Aaron Bryan, Dalvin Cory, Joshua Jung, Mark Samona and Mervin Noranha). These lads sing the songs of Take That and dance around in the imagination of the girls, who are on the cusp of seeking to forge lives for themselves in the world. The principal character is Rachel (Lara McDonnell) and her friends are Zoe (Nandi Hudson), Claire (Carragon Guest), Debbie (Jessie Mae Alonzo) and Heather (Eliza Dobson). The film begins with Rachel (Aisling Bea), who is now a nurse, winning a competition on her local radio station for four tickets to travel to Athens to see The Boys perform in concert. It is a perfect opportunity to get the girls to reconnect who are long dispersed and have had little contact with each other.

The trip begins with a scene straight out of the glitter days of Hollywood with a magnificent dance routine with the lads in top hats and tails, and the girls in exquisite gold ballgowns. It is all very glamorous as they dance on the runway in front of a huge Easyjet plane which will bring them to Athens in order to make their fantasy a reality, in a true fairy tale version of budget airlines!

Firth and Giedroc weave the songs of Take That cleverly into their plot. Fate has handed each of the girls different lives and Heather (Alice Lowe), Zoe (Amaka Okafor) and Claire (Jayde Adams) along with Rachel have experienced the inevitable ups and downs, along with the surprises and disappointments of adult life, including the fact that life is fragile. So while the overwhelming sense of the film is one of celebration of long-standing female friendships, it is not all starry-eyed.

This is a feel-good movie with a group of girls and later women. The film is tailor-made for Take That fans, and I suspect it will appeal to its intended audience. It radiates a sense of long-term commitment arising out of teenage friendship, a phenomenon worthy of celebration.