Vigil takes back control as Crown loses its shine
Vigil BBC1, Sunday-Tuesday Taking Back Control RTÉ One, Monday The Crown Netflix, streaming I’m A Celebrity – The Coming Out Show Virgin Media One, Thursday
WHEN the first series of Vigil launched two years ago it was the BBC’s biggest drama premiere for three years. Set largely on a submarine, it relied heavily on claustrophobia for its biggest shocks, not least when Detective Inspector Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) found herself bundled into a torpedo tube and ready to be shot into the murky depths at a gazillion kilometres an hour.
Of course, all came good in the end, and Silva was reunited with her girlfriend and fellow copper Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie). Now, the two are in action again, and their universe has greatly expanded. During a demonstration of a new RPAS system (that’s a remote piloted aircraft system, or military drone to you and me) in Scotland, someone takes control of one of the units and turns it on soldiers observing the test, killing seven of them.
The showpiece has been organised to impress Britain’s allies in Wudyan, a fictional country in the Middle East (played here by Morocco). It soon emerges that the suspected culprit, an operator in Scotland, could not have seized control. Instead, whoever was behind the plot was actually in Wudyan, thousands of kilometres away – when they say remotely piloted, they’re not kidding.
And so Silva hightails it to a military base there, accompanied by the daughter of a flight lieutenant who had fled with her to Scotland when he discovered her peripheral involvement, only for him to be murdered (and, sorry, yes, I did giggle when I heard he’d been shot in the Trossachs).
One by one, suspects have come to the fore, not least the two operators in Wudyan, one Scottish, the other a native, though their suspicious movements to a secret address turn out to be necessary because they are gay lovers in a country that would imprison them, if not worse, for their relationship. As the third episode ended this week, with three more tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday, Silva and the base commander, Squadron Leader Eliza Russell (the excellent Romola Garai), have been rumbled following one of the suspects, and now appear to be captives of a terrorist group bent on attacking Wudyan from within.
If this all sounds like preposterous nonsense, that’s because it more or less is, though as preposterous nonsense goes, it is up there with the best. There are issues with the pacing and, par for the course nowadays for some reason, even with the sound (in one key exchange, I had to turn on the subtitles to make sure I didn’t miss what was said), but Jones does a lot of heavy lifting to keep the show on the road, and Leslie, always reliable, holds the fort back home.
Some series are all about dialogue, atmosphere and character development, others are all about plot. Vigil leans heavily into the latter camp, and I’m invested in finding out whodunnit. Maybe I’m miles off the mark, but my money says that Air Marshall Marcus Grainger (Dougray Scott) is up to his neck in it, though I don’t yet have any idea why.
The most harrowing programme of the week was Taking Back Control, an RTÉ documentary in which Nicola Hanney told of the psychotically controlling behaviour of her partner, Garda Paul Moody, who was subsequently jailed for three years and three months when convicted of coercive control.
In one 14-hour period in July 2014, he sent her 652 messages, and over 30,000 in total. When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he told her she was ‘riddled with it’ and, in a sadly common trajectory, tried to isolate her from family and friends. Her decision to go public, in the documentary and on the Upfront With Katie Hannon programme that followed, hopefully will encourage other women in similar situations to report their own abusers. What Nicola described was deeply harrowing, but with her cancer in remission for now, she has genuinely taken back control, and the determination and strength of character Moody so cruelly tried to strip away were humbling to behold.
The final episodes of The Crown have landed, and life is too short to binge watch them all, but from what I’ve seen, its hour definitely has come. It is all about conflict between Prince William (Ed McVey) and the then prince Charles (Dominic West), and William’s instant love for Kate when he saw her in a seethrough dress in a fashion show, and it’s just not that interesting.
The series opened with the young Elizabeth (Claire Foy) becoming queen while on a tour of Kenya, in brilliant sunshine. Over the course of seven years, The Crown has got darker and darker, as indeed the life of the family did thanks to divorces, scandal and that era-defining death, and we’re maybe just too familiar with daily headlines about strife among the Windsors that attempting to dramatise it seems pointless, when the real thing is so much juicier.
Talking of kings, the I’m a Celebrity Coming Out Show on Virgin Media One was the annual show about the reception each contestant got when they left camp, all the way to Sam Thompson’s coronation as king of the jungle.
He was a worthy winner, the life and soul of the party, though I have the strong suspicion that in real life, a little of him would go a long way. Puppyish curiosity and enthusiasm are grand for a short while on television, but 24 hours a day might prove testing.
As for I’m A Celeb itself, well, once the competition is over, it’s hard to care.