What to watch
Cold Call
CHANNEL 5, 9.00PM
Spread across four nights this week (Mon-thurs), this engaging new thriller stars Sally Lindsay as June, a struggling care-worker who falls victim to a particularly nasty phone fraud when the proceeds of her house sale are stolen by a gang pretending to be her bank’s security department – leaving her penniless.
Fortunately (or maybe not) an old friend (Daniel Ryan) who also got stung turns out to be a fraud vigilante, and they decide to go after the culprits together. What follows is gripping, if not always entirely credible in the detail. Too many of the big emotional moments get cast aside in this opening episode, such is the eagerness to move the story forward; and June’s efforts to get into contact with the baddies are rather too easily achieved. (That they operate out of her hometown, for instance, is a mite convenient).
Even so, Lindsay is remarkably sympathetic in the lead role, and her situation, rooted as it is in a fear of faceless fraudsters that will be familiar to all too many viewers, lends the drama powerful elements of both ordinariness and compulsion – and a strong desire to follow June’s story through to the very end. Gerard O’donovan