The Salisbury Poisonings
B OX S E T
In March 2018 the normally quiet West Country city of Salisbury became the centre of an international incident – and this first-rate three-part drama recounts those remarkable events.
On a Sunday afternoon, a middleaged man and a young woman are found unconscious on a park bench near the city centre. Initially it is thought their state is the result of an accidental drugs overdose. That thinking begins to change when it’s established that the stricken man and woman are former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal – a double agent for MI6 who arrived in the UK in 2010 as part of a spy swap – and his daughter Yulia. Further investigation reveals that the pair are the victims of an assassination attempt, poisoned by novichok, a deadly nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The local police chiefs call in director of public health for Wiltshire Tracy Daszkiewicz (a brilliant performance from the always excellent Anne-Marie Duff ) who proceeds to do the right thing – tracking and tracing, isolating potentially affected areas. It all feels strangely prescient. Although the programme makers can’t have known it at the time of filming, there are many parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic and you may find yourself wishing that Daszkiewicz was in charge of dealing with the current crisis.
Everything about this dramatisation is admirably restrained. Avoiding the temptation to heighten tension or to emphasise spy thriller tropes, it is a respectful retelling of a true story, mindful of the fact that what happened had a huge impact on, and continues to affect, the lives of real people.