BBC1's three part The Salisbury Poisonings, about the infamous events of two years ago in that cathedral city and "based on first hand accounts and extensive interviews", was, despite the BBC not having the megabucks budget of Netflix and co;, an incisive, comprehensive, gripping, and an often emotional (I cried, obviously) look at a frightening time in the small Wiltshire city.
The fact it aired during the fourth month of the coronavirus lockdown gave it added poignancy. For what the people of Salisbury went through in 2018 the whole country, almost the whole world, is going through now. With bells on. Spore shaped bells. Recession shaped bells.
The first face we see is BBC newsreader, and now Question Time host, Fiona Bruce and she's talking, on 4th March 2018, about the threat Britain is facing from "the beast from the East". She means the danger of both the freeze and thaw that Salisbury, like much of Britain, was dealing with but there's no doubt that the makers of the show knew we'd be capable of a dual interpretation of that term.
We cut to Salisbury itself and, beneath the spires of that cathedral, we see Yulia Skripal collapsing on to the lap of her clearly very unwell father, Sergei, on a bench in a moderately busy town centre. Sergei, for his part, chucks his guts up. Police are called and the first officer on the scene is DS Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall). Soon we see Nick, at home with his loving family, sweating profusely and struggling with his vision as his pupils do whatever the opposite of dilation is. They get smaller.
The Salisbury of Bailey and Skripal is full of hugely recognisable suburban housing and this grounds the drama, makes it feel like something that could happen to any of us. The grey skies, the mobile ringtones, the kitchens, the doorbell sounds, and the cups of tea at times of crisis. It's all so familiar as to be almost quotidian but it's this, and the use of music like Lily Allen's LDN and The Jam's Start on the soundtrack, that make this a Britain we all know, recognise, and share.
Salisbury doesn't seem a city wrought by division but a place of community. Even the street drinkers we see are given the courtesy of being fully fleshed out characters with a sense of right and wrong. They are people who live and love in Salisbury and they are people, despite their problems, who are keen to do the right thing. There's no Benefits Street castigation or judgements made about 'chavs' here and, for that, I loved the show even more.
We see Charlie Rowley (Johnny Harris) present his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess (MyAnna Buring) with some fancy perfume he's found in the bin and we see them attack the booze with gusto in the flat they share in Amesbury. We also see Dawn meeting with her parents Caroline and Stan (Stella Gonet and Ron Cook) who have clearly been given custody of Dawn's daughter due to her shambolic lifestyle, problems with addiction, and inability to cope.
Wiltshire's Director of Public Health Tracy Daskiewizc (Anne-Marie Duff) and, sometimes in liaison with, sometimes at tactical loggerheads with, lantern jawed Supt Dave Minty (Darren Boyd, Frank from Killing Eve) sets about both trying to solve the mystery and trying to protect the lives (and businesses - the economy, of course, as has to be weighed up in all this) of the people of Salisbury and now Amesbury.
Daskiewicz's moral dilemmas and sleepless nights make up a fair slice of a drama that is, for the most part, played out in people's front rooms, in nondescript offices, and police station interview rooms. As we see health risks balanced with or played off against the economy we come face to face with the kind of people whose reaction to a major health crisis is how much it affects their daily routine and how much it affects the money in their pocket.
Other's lives are not so much an irrelevance or a distraction as impedimenta to be either circumnavigated or pushed out of the way. The story of a nation divided by the historical own goal of Brexit. Although, thankfully, The Salisbury Poisonings doesn't linger on that as long as I choose to.
Instead, and equally topically, it presents medical staff not as heroes we clap and ultimately sacrifice but as calm, considered, and professional people doing a difficult job in trying circumstances. The juxtaposition of the World Cup footage (in Russia of all places) and Theresa May announcing that Britain won't be sending any politicians or members of the royal family there as some kind of punishment (even though the England team went and did surprisingly well) brings home to us how different that summer must have been in Salisbury to everywhere else in the country.
Something we're all getting a much clearer feel for now. As we lapped up England trouncing Panama 6-1 and Harry Kane taking the Golden Boot before the semi-final defeat against Croatia, it seems the volumes on the TVs of many houses in Salisbury were set considerably lower. There's an almost unbearably heartbreaking moment when Nick Bailey's wife Sarah (Annabel Scholey) tells her kids that daddy's been poisoned and it's far from the only one in a programme that, though often understated in telling the story of what became a global news event, grew in quiet strength with each instalment.
No spoilers but right at the end of the series we see (some of) the real people whose lives have been portrayed to us by actors during the last three hours. This underlined the veracity of the drama but it also gave it one last emotional punch and, again, the tears were hard to keep in. I don't even bother trying anymore.
"The truth isn't for people like us" says Dawn's mum to her dad from a seaside bench nearing the end of the drama and while that's sadly true, while state sponsored assassination can go unpunished on foreign shores, while Putin remains in power, and while we have a (now even worse) Tory government in office with no intention of changing that, we'll be subject to a lot more of these tragedies in the next four and a half years. Enjoy the collapse.
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