TV Review: Vigil is loaded up with tricks to make it addictive — and it totally works
Martin Compston in Vigil, the new Sunday night drama on BBC One
Vigil (BBC One Sunday and BBC iPlayer) is like your take-away on a Sunday night. You know it’s loaded up with tricks to make it addictive, but you horse into it anyway and enjoy it while it lasts. The first two episodes have a nice few ‘woah, did that just happen?’ moments that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in similar shows like and .
Spoiler alert, but one such moment is the fact that they cast Martin Compston (aka Steve Arnott from ) in a starring role, and decided to kill him after one scene.
The action takes place on HMS Vigil, a nuclear submarine patrolling the coast off Scotland. It’s basically the British Navy versus the police.
Compston’s character, Craig Burke, is found dead in his bunk after a very amateur murder-disguised-as-drug-overdose. Detective Amy Silva is winched on-board to find out what happened. She’s played by the incomparable Suranne Jones, who takes the eye in every scene. We learn that she is understandably traumatised after her husband and kids died when their car plunged into a body of water. (Or did they die?) Anyway, she’s the last person who you’d send to do a bit of work on a submarine.
Is her boss a bit fishy. Why is there a body lying on the road as Silva makes her way to the navy base? Hang on, it’s just some anti-navy activist pretending to be dead. Hang on, now SHE’s trying to break into the naval base, oh right, so she was Craig Burke’s girlfriend and he was onto something dodgy in the navy. Wait a minute, Silva’s partner in the investigation is your one who played the wildling from Game of Thrones, Rose Leslie. And herself and Silva are former lovers.
Oh, and by the way, it looks like HMS Vigil is being tracked by a new type of submarine that can’t be detected by sonar or whatever they use these days. And finally, the heads of the Navy are as trustworthy as Boris Johnson.
That, and a lot more, was all in the first episode. It was all very WHAT’S GOING ON ‘ERE THEN? And I can’t wait to watch more of it.
Believable thanks to the leading actors, gets that the best TV thrillers are more about the journey than the destination. Yes, I want to know what really happened to Craig Burke. But not as much as I want to sit back and enjoy the way the story lurches off in weird, unpredictable directions. Vigil isn’t perfect — a few of the supporting actors are behaving as if they farted in a tube carriage and are trying to make it clear it wasn’t them. But as a trashy Sunday night take-away, it really hits the spot.
