BODYGUARD
Richard Madden plays Costner to Keeley Hawes’ Whitney in a scarily tense thriller from Line Of Duty’s Jed Mercurio that had half the nation biting its fingernails in September. Liberally festooned with sadistic surprises and bookended by two nerve-shredding sequences involving suicide vests, Bodyguard is a prime example of watercooler TV – one that left ITV’s Vanity Fair adap trailing in its wake.
After defusing a terrorist incident on a London-bound train, troubled war vet turned specialist protection copper David Budd (Madden) is given a plumb new assignment – shadowing Julia Montague (Hawes), a home secretary with designs on Number 10.
The scale of the task becomes clear after she narrowly survives a sniper attack. Yet the greater threat may be Budd himself, whose concern for her well-being masks a resentment of the policies she supported that left him with physical and psychological scars.
Mercurio’s love of fiendish conspiracies, long interrogation scenes and the wanton dispensing of key characters makes for an occasionally credulity-stretching saga. Indeed, one particular act of thwarted selfharm pushes the narrative seriously close to shark-jumping territory.
Like the best Line Of Duty arcs, however, Bodyguard cries out to be watched in its compulsive entirety
– for one thing, it sees Madden stake a claim to a certain super-spy role that could soon be up for grabs. Neil Smith