First Night: House of Saddam

What did you make of BBC2's House of Saddam?

BBC2's new drama, House of Saddam, sets itself the task of charting the rise and fall of one of the most brutal dictators in recent history. Less than two years after the death of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, this is a brave project indeed, writes Heidi Blake.

Last night's episode, the first of a four-part-drama airing at 9pm on Wednesdays, began with Saddam's young daughter's birthday party in 1979 - a celebration he used to cover a coup - and ended with his older daughter's opulent wedding.

The series - set mostly amidst the grandeur of Saddam's presidential palace - aims to follow the impact of the dictator's political ambitions on his family, his friends, his advisors and on himself. To succeed would be no mean feat. So what did the critics make of the show's first night?

"House of Saddam is like The Sopranos without the jokes," wrote Nancy Banks Smith in the Guardian, but "it succeeds very well".

It has the same sleepy-smiling, cigar-smoking, overweight and overwhelming gang boss, Saddam (Igal Naor), who swells to fill the screen. And the same truly terrifying old mother, black-swathed Subha (Izabella Telezynska), whose eyes seemed to have burned a hole in the fabric of her veil...The story is serpentine. The man behind the moustache is a mystery. It is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt and it succeeds very well.

Tim Teeman of the Times described the show as being "convincing and chilling".

This had the pace of real drama and the advantage of being - dramatically - unexplored territory. It was soap (the feeling of Dallas was heightened by the late-1970s/early-1980s tacky glam: check out Saddam's glass lift), it was reality, it was cheeky and it was terrifying. Saddam's reign was one of such excess and terror, it was hard to see where reality ended and fiction began.

In the Daily Telegraph, Serena Davies said that the drama portrayed Saddam and his relations as characters rather than caricatures: "a not inconsiderable achievement".

In dramatising the hundred imagined private conversations that led to public decisions, the programme couldn't hope for realism. It had a complex story to tell and at times resorted to clunking exposition to do it. There was the decision to go to war with Iran, for example.

This took all of three minutes and included such implausible synopses of international politics as "Perhaps we should seek the views of our allies, both Arab and Western. If there is to be war they will benefit, so why shouldn't they contribute?

But much of the conjecture worked well, most importantly in the flesh and bones it gave to Saddam. Naor's towering version of the dictator envisioned him as both adept family schemer and political giant.

The Independent's Thomas Sutcliffe also noted the comparisons with other dramas. But while Nancy Banks Smith felt that House of Saddam was more solemn than The Sopranos, Sutcliffe wrote:

The dialogue in The Sopranos seemed to be imitating life. The dialogue in House of Saddam frequently seems to be imitating Dallas.

House of Saddam certainly isn't dull and though Igal Naor's performance struggles a little with the stock swarthy-villain effect that follows from the decision to have everyone speak a heavily accented English, he does effectively capture the penumbra of terror that must have surrounded Saddam... The drama also conveys the extent of Saddam's ruthlessness, which led him to execute his closest friend and his own brother-in-law.

So a veritable smorgasbord of critical viewpoints there, but on balance it seems safe to say they thought that House of Saddam was a success on its first night. What did you think?