Watch TV with Paul Flynn
‘There was nothing sane about Chernobyl,’ dictates a man with bad skin and Deirdre Barlow glasses into a cassette recorder. He’s just fed his cat. The sky outside is bleak and disorientating. ‘All of it… madness,’ he continues, before hanging himself while his tabby licks its satisfied chops. Though arresting, this isn’t quite the introduction that this five-part drama deserves. The madness comes later.
The first episode of Chernobyl is a painterly, mood-establishing piece that borders on the arthouse. It won’t be for everyone. Clouds of billowing black smoke gather slow, poetic speed. A bird falls limp from the sky. Nuclear rain is exposed, glistening under street lighting. Bleak Russian estates catch the glow. Scientists’ skin reddens, then blisters. A wife wishes her fireman husband a foreboding adieu, as he heads to what sounds like a routine call-out.
Anyone hoping that the HBO network might have brought a Game Of Thronesstyle thrill ride to the 1986 explosion at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant will justifiably leave scratching their chins. That Chernobyl shares a director with Breaking Bad is another red herring. If there is a star emerging from the opening hour, it is almost certainly the production designer.
The dialogue is minimal, the music eerie and the sole raised voice pokes over it under a portrait of Lenin, in a wood-panelled bunker. Elsewhere, there is only half-lit despair and a flicker of futile hope. The cumulative effect of all this is dramatically strange, like opening Titanic with half an hour of people you have no prior knowledge of clinging to icebergs. Yet the daring pays off. After 45 minutes of slow, real-time panic, as a viewer you start to feel a little queasy.
It’s only in episode two, when the venerable, Oscar-nominated Emily Watson sounds the alarm on the detritus of the explosion at a laboratory in Minsk that the pace cranks up. The fireman’s wife, played by this season’s hottest young breakout star, Jessie Buckley, emerges into a proper storyline. Nurses rage into action, invalids fall off stretchers and suddenly we aren’t only locked into a story of men with moustaches telling lies to one another to save their backs. The human dynamic to the world’s third largest man-made tragedy is introduced. Suddenly, there is actual madness.
Begins Wednesday, Sky Atlantic, 10pm