History reframed so that we remember the victims
How soon is too soon to dramatise history? Do you need the consent of everybody involved, or does the fact that it dominated the news make this the nation’s story? The makers of The Salisbury Poisonings (BBC One) must surely have grappled with these questions. What they have produced is a solid drama, well-acted and presumably well-researched because the screenwriters, Adam Parrison and Declan Lawn, are former Panorama journalists.
Where they have played with the narrative is their choice of protagonist. The central figures, former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, are sidelined – it begins with the moment they were found unconscious on a bench, poisoned by a nerve agent. We do follow two of the other victims – Nick Bailey, the detective who was one of the first on the scene, and Dawn Sturgess, a mother who came into contact with the poison via a discarded perfume bottle. But the unlikely focus is Tracy Daszkiewicz, Director of Public Health for Wiltshire Council, which is not a job title you’d find in any big budget disaster movie.
The tropes are here though: Tracy (Anne-marie Duff) is introduced as women in disaster movies always are, which is having a hurried breakfast and organising the school run before heading off to a job dealing with science. Soon, Tracy is drafted in to help lead the response in Salisbury. She proves supremely capable, although did she really stride around police HQ issuing instructions about gathering CCTV footage and sealing off the town centre? In this drama, the police chiefs appear to be clueless.
Watching this in the age of coronavirus was stressful. I winced as Good Samaritans approached the Skripals after seeing them in distress. Here was Bailey (Rafe Spall) unknowingly contaminated, walking into his house. Oh Lord, he’s touching the light switch. And the mugs, and the kettle, and the fridge door. Bailey’s story was the most harrowing, as we knew – but he didn’t – that he was about to become terribly ill.
This first episode featured only snatches of Sturgess’s story. But it was important to begin with her, showing her to be a loving mother in difficult circumstances. The poisonings grabbed attention because they put an English cathedral city at the centre of a spy tale with the hallmarks of a thriller. The death of an innocent woman was sidelined. This is retelling history, but also reframing it to ensure that we don’t forget the personal cost.
As a rule of thumb, if a documentary keeps bashing you over the head with claims that its contents are a bombshell, you will find yourself underwhelmed. The Queen and the Coup (Channel 4) was an interesting footnote in history considerably over-egged.
The “extraordinary” secret evidence takes us on “a trail that will lead to none other than Her Majesty, the Queen”. “Little does she know,” the programme said, as we approached the first anniversary of her reign in 1953, “that she is about to be deployed in a coup d’état in a country 3,500 miles away.”
Well, sort of. The crux of the story was that Britain (then with Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary) and the US were scheming to depose Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and the jittery Shah was on the verge of fleeing the country. Then the US sent a telegram to their ambassador, Loy Henderson, which read: “Foreign Office this afternoon informed us of receipt message from Eden from Queen Elizabeth expressing concern at latest developments re Shah and strong hope we can find some means of dissuading him from leaving country.”
Henderson rushed off to tell the Shah that his fellow monarch wanted him to stay. The Shah stayed, Mosaddegh was overthrown. The Queen had helped to stage a coup!
Except that this was quite the diplomatic blunder. The “Queen Elizabeth” of the telegram actually referred to RMS Queen Elizabeth, a boat upon which Eden was sailing to Canada. The Americans soon realised their mistake but kept schtum.
It was a fascinating story. But the breathless voice-over and the framing of the telegram as something that changed the course of history diminished the findings. The coup “triggered a chain of events that nearly seven decades later continue to shake the world,” we were told. But there’s a gap in our knowledge. We don’t know how the Shah reacted to the telegram. He was previously preparing to leave the country, and then he didn’t. Who knows what else might have swayed him? Not the programme-makers.
The Salisbury Poisonings ★★★★ The Queen and the Coup ★★★