Kosminsky’s Isil drama was no recruiting video

The State C4, Sunday to Wednesday

elevision doesn’t like auteurs. In the wide expanses of cinema, they can lose themselves in introspection or innovation, but the small screen treats them with suspicion. America traditionally doesn’t have them – the harsh stipulations of the advertisingdriven networks sees to that, and Britain keeps them to a minimum. Dennis Potter was one; so was Alan Bleasdale – and today, we’re limited to the erratic work of Dominic Savage and to the increasingly overblown dramas of Stephen Poliakoff. But there’s someone else working in television who is giving this most grandiose of titles a good name.

Peter Kosminsky would almost certainly never refer to himself as an “auteur”. He seems too socially minded to have time for such an egocentric label. With the exception of Wolf Hall (on which he took only the directing credit), his work over the past decade or so – The Government Inspector, The Promise, Britz – has shown there are overriding sensibilities that unite his work and make you very aware that you are watching a Kosminsky production. He has a campaigning anger that scorches the screen, a commitment to making those in the corridors of power feel queasy, and a humanity that is capable of tearing the viewer’s heart to shreds. The State, which ran over four consecutive nights last week, achieved all of these things and more. It was an exceptional work of erudition that chose to examine the complex, various reasons as to why young Britons would choose to flee to Syria and fight in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

In the first few minutes, we met Jalal (Sam Otto) who wanted to emulate his brother who had, apparently, died a martyr; Ziyaad (Ryan McKen), his lunk of a best friend who saw Syria as a land

Tof opportunity; Ushna (Shavani Cameron), a spoilt teenager who had been radicalised on the internet, and Shakira (Ony Uhiara), a tough junior doctor whose fervent commitment to bring her medical skills to the country’s crumbling hospitals was naively out of step with Isil’s attitudes to the 21st-century career woman. Shakira brought her son Isaac (Nana Agyeman-Bediako) with her: nine years old, full of hope and, until the last episode, when he began training to become a killing machine, constant to his own moral code. Kosminsky didn’t show us the previous lives of these fellow travellers and I think that was a powerful decision as the familiarity of a UK backstory could have manipulated our thoughts as to whom we imagined this ragtag bunch to be. Instead, we were thrown straight into the nightmare, into the unremitting bleakness of life for radicalised Muslims.

I was particularly impressed with the scenes set in the maqqar (women’s sanctuary), where candlelit dinners were marked by looks of mistrust which flickered between the women whose sole purpose was to find a husband, aided by a fair amount of passive aggression by white convert Umm Walid (played with just the right amount of malevolent creepiness by Jessica Gunning). The women’s fates were dealt with swiftly – it seemed like no time from Ushna recoiling in horror at the sight of the communal loos to trying to communicate with her jihadist hubby via a translation app called “Kwik Arab”.

The humanisation of these characters was done with the lightest of touches, yet they were also, by necessity, unknowable; hidden behind fervent ideologies. We knew, eventually, that Jalal had a heart and a conscience – that he was desperate to save Ibtisam (Maisa Abd Elhadi), the enslaved Yazidi woman whom his commander had “permitted him” to rape. But Kosminsky gave us no dramatic signposts as to what he might be feeling. In a deeply moving scene in which his father (Nitin Ganatra) came to reclaim him, heartbroken that his son had chosen to betray the country that had given his family sanctuary, Jalal could only articulate his thoughts with the tersest use of modern parlance. “I’m not comin’ home. End of.”

We were thrown straight into the bleakness of life for radicalised Muslims

Kosminsky used violence sparingly, but when the scenes came, they were profoundly shocking. A bomb attack on a maternity ward showed newborn babies blown out of their incubators; Shakira was forced to remove the kidneys of the enemy and put them to good use in a city without dialysis machines; an act of kindness from Sayed (Amir El-Masry), a gentle local pharmacist with a love of caffeine, was juxtaposed with a public amputation in a city square which Zayeed was sure to add to his photo gallery.

The State was smart enough not to be a thriller, nor was it necessarily beholden to a verité