TV review: The Salisbury Poisonings focuses on the stuff of nightmares
The drama centres on Wiltshire's director of public health Tracy Daszkiewicz, played by Anne-Marie Duff
I’m not sure how (Netflix) managed to stay under the radar. It’s been out for a few months now and there has been very little fuss about it. Maybe a three-parter can’t cut it in pandemic times, when we need a minimum of 10 episodes to keep us going through the winter.
But is a cracker. It’s a dramatisation of the 2018 poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury England. The poison was a spooky nerve agent known as novichok, which someone smeared on the front door of his house. Given Sergei had spied on his native Russia for British intelligence, it’s assumed that this was Vladimir Putin and co getting their revenge. It certainly doesn’t look like a neighbourly fall-out over a hedge.
The writing is edge-of-the-seat stuff, even though most viewers will have some inkling of the story.
Rather than focus on the politics, the writers bring us into the action through three locals in Salisbury, a small city, off the beaten track.
The first is the woman in charge of Public Health in Salisbury, Tracy Daszkiewich, played brilliantly by Anne-Marie Duff. Her job is to prevent thousands of deaths by shutting the city down to make sure the novichok doesn’t spread. So this four year old story feels very here and now.
The second protagonist is Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), the policeman who first went to Skripal’s house and ended up contaminated.
The third is Dawn Sturgess, an unlucky civilian who ended up poisoned by freak accident.
The story flows in a way that we get into these people’s lives and start to care about them. Daszkiewich is anxious at first, a regional health official dealing with a chemical war, but she grows into the challenge. It’s just as well because novichok could have killed thousands if she didn’t act as she did.
We care about the policeman Bailey through the eyes of his wife and two daughters, who have to deal with their dad collapsing at home and being spirited off to an isolation ward.
Dawn Sturgess is the most interesting of all. For most of the show, she is a woman struggling with addiction issues in a provincial city. Novichok is just a story on the news, until a well-intentioned move by her boyfriend brings her into contact with the poison.
Unfolding in what feels like real time, kept me on the edge of my seat, even though I know that they managed to avoid mass fatalities.
The only reason I know this is because we are not in the middle of World War 3. Russia denies it had anything to do with the poisonings, which puts it up there with Boris Johnson on the trust front.
I have a feeling we banished Salisbury 2018 from our collective memory because it’s the stuff of nightmares.
But this show is a reminder that Cold War never went away. Give it a watch.
