Happy Valley meets Twin Peaks in delightful pastiche
‘This in’t Twin Peaks.” “This is not Broadchurch.” “It’s a bit f---ing better than Doc Martin.” You cannot fault the residents of Chadder Vale, the fictional northern setting for ITV1’S six-part thriller
Passenger (continuing tonight/all on ITVX), for their perspicacity, nor the series’ creator for his cheek. Andrew Buchan, latterly seen as Andrew Parker Bowles in The Crown and baddie Col Mchugh in Better, is himself a Broadchurch veteran (he played grieving plumber Mark Latimer), and Passenger – his absorbing and accomplished screenwriting debut – is accordingly steeped in the lore of television mysteries, while carving out its own peculiar, unsettling identity.
When a girl goes missing, the panic is intense but brief – she reappears, seemingly none the worse. But Wunmi Mosaku’s shrewd cop, Riya Ajunwa suspects foul play: why do people’s bins keep disappearing? What’s with all the potholes, let alone the discovery of a disembowelled stag in the possibly cursed woodlands? Is there a connection to anti-fracking protests, the disappearance of a Swedish girl or the vanishing contents of a lorry?
Leading a rock-solid cast including David Threlfall, Daniel Ryan and Jo Hartley, Mosaku is wry, warm, flinty and effortlessly commanding, reminding British telly of what we’ve been missing while she has been gracing US small-screen blockbusters from Loki to Lovecraft Country. “You’re like Vera, boss,” reckons one of Riya’s greener colleagues, but Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood is a more apposite if intimidating comparison: Riya is in the community but not quite of it, her dogged independence keeping her at a professionally useful remove.
Initially exasperated by the triviality of the job (“A cat with a cough? I was in the Met for 10 years”), she finds fear beginning to grip her when an unrepentant ex-con suddenly returns and the case gets ever weirder.
The midsection sags a little, but Passenger wants for neither ambition nor ideas: the tone veers deftly from dark comedy to folk horror to backwoods puzzle box, touching on ecowarriors, left-behind communities (Manchester feels tantalisingly out of reach here) and the isolating, anxiety inducing effects of the teenage addiction to screens. Crucially, it ends somewhere wholly unexpected – think Black Mirror adopting the guise of an ITV policier – yet just about plausible, confirming what we already knew: that the biggest monsters are human. And yes, Passenger does stick the landing, while leaving scope for another flight. Buckle up.
Remember the headlines: British Historian Discovers Atlantis? The immediate problem with Atlantis: The Discovery with Dan Snow (Channel 5) is the hard evidence about the legendary kingdom some believe lies buried beneath the waves: if there was any, we’d know about it. To his credit, Snow didn’t prolong the hokum any longer than necessary: it took just 10 minutes for classicist Jasmine Elmer to debunk the idea that Plato’s parable of human hubris and divine retribution might have actually happened. “A story with little reality sprinkles on top,” she surmised.
In place of any ersatz tension came a more revealing hunt for the inspiration behind Plato’s story, written around 360BC. In effect, it became a history of Greek civilisation by stealth, from the thriving maritime culture of Akrotiri to Helike, submerged by a tsunami and whose destruction accounted for the Spartan admiral who had once tried to sell the philosopher into slavery.
It was underpinned by admiration for the pioneers who, through intuition and expertise, made some of the Mediterranean’s most significant archaeological discoveries. Snow, to his obvious delight, even met one of them. Dora Katsonopoulou was sporting a yellow blazer that even Michael Portillo might have deemed outré, but it was her perseverance and marriage of cutting-edge techniques with a close reading of an ancient travelogue that enabled the discovery of Helike: it transpired that the once thriving metropolis had sunk into an inland lagoon rather than the sea.
Atlantis was also bolstered not by the CGI which remains the first resort of the lazier modern-history documentary, but by lavishly filmed walls, pottery, murals and so on. While presumably unappreciated at the time, a plus point to the tsunamis and eruptions which plagued the region was the way in which saltwater or volcanic ash preserved these features. And anchoring the whole thing was a man who, through his bubbling excitement and expansive gestures, is coming ever more to resemble his father. Greek ruins are his election night, and everyone’s a winner.
Passenger ★★★★ Atlantis: The Discovery ★★★