A feature-length television play documenting the final, tragic year in the life of a gifted but troubled teenager.
Philip Knight (Daniel Newman) is a promising fifteen-year-old whose intelligence and sensitivity set him apart from his peers on a tough housing estate. He struggles to reconcile his academic potential with a volatile home life and the pressures of adolescence. The narrative follows his intense relationships with his girlfriend Karen Panter (Holly Aird) and his more worldly friend Simon (Charlie Creed-Miles). As his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and self-destructive, a desperate act leads to his incarceration in an adult prison, where the teenager ultimately takes his own life.
Director Peter Kosminsky brings his signature docu-drama intensity to Jeremy Brock’s unsparing script. The film rejects melodrama for a raw, naturalistic portrait of adolescent alienation, using a handheld camera style to create a sense of claustrophobia and impending crisis. Produced by the socially conscious Yorkshire Television, the drama is an unflinching examination of a life derailed by circumstance, where intelligence offers no escape from emotional turmoil. The story is constructed as a grimly inevitable tragedy, observing its protagonist’s descent with a forensic and unsentimental eye that became a hallmark of Kosminsky’s work.
Broadcast: ITV – Yorkshire, 1 Episode, 18 August 1993
Written by: Jeremy Brock
Director: Peter Kosminsky
Executive Producer: Keith Richardson
Main Cast: Daniel Newman (Philip Knight), Holly Aird (Karen Panter), Terence Beesley (Joe Dowdell), Angus MacFadyen (David McBride), Suzanne Bertish (Margaret Harris), Philip Jackson (Stan Eastwood), Charlie Creed-Miles (Simon Knight), John Griffiths (Teacher)
