The Salisbury Poisonings: News re-enactment drama adds a layer of humanity that was absent from reports

There’s something strange about watching these events now, through the gauze of the current pandemic ★★★★✩
Alastair McKay14 June 2020

Robbed of surprise, guilty of distortion, the news re-enactment drama is a genre with its own problems.

Oddly, in a time when reality is dismissed as fake news and the media are forced, in the name of balance, to give equal weighting to propaganda and verifiable fact, the NRD, even one “based on first-hand accounts”, will be judged in a different way to a fictional flight of fancy.

Whether The Salisbury Poisonings makes good on its promise will depend on where it goes in future episodes, but the opening is stark.

What happens? Well, we know what happened, to the extent that it is possible to comprehend a murder attempt mixed with espion­age, propagated by a foreign power on British soil.

BBC/Dancing Ledge/Huw John

But in reworking those events from 2018 as drama, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson (writers with a current affairs background) add a layer of humanity that was absent in the reporting of the Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal (an ex-MI6 agent who had worked within the Russian foreign intelligence agency, the GRU).

There is, inevitably, a hint of Chernobyl about the way the drama unfolds. The scale of events is not comparable, although an act of grim terror could be construed as more malign than an accident borne of bureaucratic incompetence.

There’s also something strange about watching these events now, through the gauze of the current pandemic. At the level of drama, this means an ironic opening in which the easing of a weather event — the “Beast from the East” — is contrasted with an act of Cold War cynicism.

BBC/Dancing Ledge/Jonathan Birch

It starts with a man and his daughter — Skripal and his daughter Yulia — shivering on a bench in a Salisbury shopping precinct. A policeman, DS Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), is among those who go to help, and is soon taken ill. After a “weird night”, he has tea and toast with his family and tries to shrug his illness off.

Television shows in 2020

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The official response to a growing crisis is headed by Wiltshire’s director of public health, Tracy Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff). She soon finds herself operating at the far edge of her experience. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” she is asked. “I’ll tell you when I know what it is we’re doing,” she replies.

There are obvious comparisons with today’s viral reality, and not just in the way Spall’s copper tries to pass his ill-health off as a winter bug. The broader theme is one of plucky Britons, never far from their next cuppa, trying to cope with an unimagined horror.

The Salisbury Poisonings airs Sunday, BBC One, 9pm

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