Kiri
CHANNEL 4, 9.00PM
Jack Thorne’s bleak but unmissable drama turns the tension up another notch tonight as the repercussions from Kiri’s death continue to be felt by everyone involved, in particular social worker Miriam (Sarah Lancashire), who finds herself in the eye of a growing storm with experts calling for her resignation and her house being staked out by the press. Meanwhile, Alice (Lia Williams) and her hapless husband Jim (Steven Mackintosh) head on to the national press circuit – much to the disgust of their increasingly unnerving teenage son Si (Finn Bennett) – to talk about their foster daughter’s death and why the unsupervised meeting with her biological grandfather Tobi (Lucian Msamati) was allowed.
While both Lancashire and Williams are fantastic (and it is to Williams’s credit that we feel both sympathetic to and oddly repelled by the grieving Alice), this episode belongs to Msamati. The outstanding script by Thorne and playwright Rachel De-lahay doesn’t waste a word, as it reveals more about Tobi and his relationship with his estranged son Nate (an excellent Paapa Essiedu), and how even the smallest of actions can wreak damage for years to come. Sarah Hughes