Today Will Not End:Prisoner 951.

You'll remember the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was detained in Iran from April 2016 to March 2022, you'll remember how a succession of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries failed to secure her release, and you'll remember how the case revolved around a large amount of money that the UK owed Iran but had not paid.

So you might wonder why that story has been made into the television drama Prisoner 951 (BBC1/iPlayer, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and based on Nazanin's own book A Yard Of Sky) and you'd be forgiven for thinking there's not much new you could learn about the case. Even more for assuming it might be a bit short of drama. Horrific though it is, how much can be eked out of a woman sat for days in solitary confinement?

You can put those misgivings aside because Prisoner 951 is a compelling and powerful drama that may fall short of game changers like Mr Bates Vs The Post Office and Adolescence but is definitely worthy of its place in the second tier of dramas that look at real life news stories. I'm thinking of programmes like The Thief, His Wife And The Canoe and The Hunt For Raoul Moat.

We begin with Nazanin (Narges Rashidi) returning with her young daughter Gabriella from a short trip to Iran to visit family. Except she only gets as far as the airport where she is apprehended, arrested, and accused of being a spy. As Gabriella is taken away from her, screaming "mummy", and placed in the care of Nazanin's mother (Behi Djanati Atai), father (Bijan Daneshmand), and brother (Kave Niku).

For Nazanin, the nightmare has only just begun. Initially, she is told she'd be released the next day but if she refuses to co-operate she'll never see her daughter again. The fact that she deactivated her Facebook account before visiting Iran (a common practice as Iranian expats are only too aware of the paranoid behaviour of the Iranian state) is seen as proof she is as spy and she's soon shunted around a selection of grim penitentiaries.

Evin House of Dentention, the Moghassas Court prison compound, and the Kerman Central Prison. You could make a grisly tour t-shirt up for Nazanin's, or Prisoner 951 as the authorities call her, road trip. She is told that if she doesn't answer questions satisfactorily that "today will never end". The trouble is, she is answering the questions honestly and they neither believe her nor have any respect for her/ Or women in general.

She's told she's not wearing the hijab correctly and instructed not to talk to other women. All by men who are at liberty to do whatever they like. Many of whom have guns and are both at liberty to use them and happy to advertise this fact. Nazanin is soon enough accused of corroborating with MI6 in an attempt to overthrow the Iranian regime.

Nazanin, at one point, refuses food and becomes ill. At times it seems she has no hope, it seems there IS no hope, but she remains strong and defiant, heroic even, as both the British and Iranian administrations fail her unforgivably. Husband Richard (Joseph Fiennes), back in London, finds it difficult to get information on what's happening to Nazanin.

The 'Iran desk' at the Foreign Office advise him to wait, to do nothing and the government representatives he comes into contact with are either useless or worse. Which is hardly a surprise when you consider the venality and incompetence of the last few Conservative governments. Tobias Ellwood (Alastair Mackenzie) is patronising and riled, James Cleverly (Christopher Colquhoun) is ineffective, and Liz Truss (Vivienne Gibbs) is, well, Liz Truss. Even if the sole Labour MP, the Ratcliffe's elected member in Hampstead - Tulip Siddiq (Farzana Dua Elahe), isn't much help.

The worst by far, as you'll probably recall, is Boris Johnson whose carelessness and incompetence not only keeps Nazanin in prison at a time when release is looking likely but puts her in a position where she may possibly end up facing execution. It's not to be the last time he failed Nazanin (as he failed the entire country) but it is by far the worse.

In Iran, Nazanin's family try to help out but are not helped by the Iranian authorities. Judges are haranguing and intransigent and interrogators are suspicious and threatening (though it could be argued they too are prisoners of a poisoned system, I'd make the case that they are, in the brilliant words of Hannah Arendt when writing about Adolf Eichmann, examples of "the banality of evil). It soon becomes apparent that the Iranian authorities themselves don't even believe that Nazanin has done what they have accused her of, and imprisoned her for, doing.

Instead, she is collateral, a pawn in a game which she not only never agreed to play but didn't even know was being played. In Britain, this also dawns on Richard (we're shown stock footage of the Shah and Saddam Hussein as interesting but probably unnecessary background detail) and he decides he can no longer "add to the silence" and that he must do something.

Which he does. Petitions and protests gain traction but this places Nazanin's family in Iran in danger. The news of the 'deal' between Iran and Britain makes the news (even if the British government deny there being any deal) but as the news coverage is dominated by Brexit (and Theresa May replacing David Cameron and starting off a merry-go-round of party leaders) and then Covid many don't have the bandwidth to engage with it. Tweets, at a time when sane people still tweeted, don't cut it.

When we see Richard reading Peppa Pig stories to his daughter over a video call, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the makers of Prisoner 951 are having a dig at Johnson, famously a huge fan of the cartoon porker. Other salient political points are made more gently, there's a score by Dickon Hinchcliffe, once of Tindersticks, a few scenes in an open women's prison where the solidarity and camaraderie of the inmates is genuinely touching - and very much at odds with the male dominated environments in the same country, and some terribly moving scenes of Nazanin missing her daughter's birthday - and not just one of them.

I cried - mostly at the scenes involving Gabriella - but I was also angered by the geopolitical machinations that can, and do, destroy people's lives. The fact that many of the scenes are filmed in Farsi with subtitles shouldn't bother you at all and you can laugh off the fact that most of the actors playing well known politicians don't look much like the people they're playing (the Liz Truss here is nowhere near as moronic as the real life Liz Truss). Prisoner 951 can feel, in places, a bit like The Handmaid's Tale. Only Prisoner 951 is real. And though Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and fellow British-Iranian Anoosheh Ashoori, is now free and back with her family. Iran (along with Syria, Egypt, Thailand, and Turkey) still have an alarming number of 'political' prisoners.