A TV drama so bad it could be Russian propaganda
Finally, DCI Amy Silva has her killer. Not only that, but she’s thwarted a plot to destabilise the world order by targeting Britain’s nuclear deterrent. So she’s going to be glued to the interrogation room interview in which dastardly sonar operator Matthew Doward is grilled on how he ended up as a Russian operative, right? Wrong. “No comment,” said Doward. And... there it ended. “He’s a narcissist,” declared Silva. “It made him feel special. That’s all I need to see.” She may as well have rolled her eyes and said: “Ugh, typical man.” Now, off to rekindle that romance with the lovely DI Longacre.
I think I understood the rest of the plot of the Vigil finale (BBC One), which basically amounted to the entire series – the murder of Craig Burke and Jackie the chef and the XO and the peace protester, the poisoning of the coxswain, a near miss with an oil tanker, a high-level deal to have a drug dealer released from an Indonesian prison, and poor Silva (Suranne Jones) being locked in a torpedo tube before having a sexy flashback and remembering her Morse code – was all so that the sub would be forced to surface, and the Russians could take some pictures of it and tow it home as a PR stunt. In other words, a plan to make the Royal Navy look like idiots. Surely the Russians could have achieved that at lower cost by broadcasting a six-part drama series just like this one?
The hokey thriller elements were fun though: Lorne Macfadyen going full Bond baddie as Doward, Prentice (Adam James) meeting a gruesome end replete with squelchy sound effects, and two actors manfully – if that word is allowed here – trying to shut the ballast valve while getting absolutely soaked. They were alerted to this valve problem by a “bilge warning”, to which you may supply your own punchline.
Then there was Commander Newsome (Paterson Joseph) maintaining his sangfroid despite commanding the most disaster-prone sub in military history. Things were going much more smoothly on dry land, where DI Longacre (Rose Leslie) was devising her own rules for dealing with suspects under caution by interviewing one on a park bench.
But what do I know? This has been the BBC’S ratings hit of the year – more than 10 million people have watched the first episode. A second series is under negotiation, but apparently won’t be set on a submarine. The possibilities are endless. Vigil aboard the International Space Station? With these scripts, anything’s possible.
Imagine the pain of losing your mother when you are a young child and then growing up to lose your brother in the same circumstances. Kate Ballard was four when her mother, the famous climber Alison Hargreaves, died on K2 in 1995. Her brother, Tom, inherited his mother’s passions; with a horrible inevitability he died in 2019 while climbing another Himalayan mountain, Nanga Parbat.
Chris Terrill first made a film about the family a month after Hargreaves’s death, when they travelled to the Himalayas to fulfil Tom’s wish to see “Mummy’s last mountain”. In 2019, Kate made another pilgrimage, to Nanga Parbat, and Terrill followed her in The Last Mountain (BBC Two).
As the film moved between time periods it sometimes had a ramshackle quality. Emotionally, though, it was piercing. Terrill was filming when Tom and his climbing partner went missing, and in the room with the children’s father, Jim, when Kate called to say a search team had spotted two bodies.
Jim’s reaction to this shocking news and his daughter’s distress was, on the face of it, odd: “OK, dear. So how are you bearing up with that? You really do need to try and find something to do that takes your mind off it, so you can go back to trying to remember the good times.” A sobbing Kate fired back that she will not accept her brother is dead.
Jim is the enigma in this film. Is this bloodless response his form of self-protection, after the agony of losing his wife? Or was he always like this? Terrill asked him few questions. There will be those who believe that mountaineers such as Hargreaves have a selfish streak, risking it all when there are young children at home; but seeing footage of Tom talking about climbing as a spiritual calling helped us to understand why they do it.
Kate, though, came across as a lost soul for whom you felt desperately sorry. One of the most moving moments was seeing her reunited with “Big Ibrahim”, the Pakistani guide who had carried her on his shoulders during that first trip to K2 in the wake of her mother’s death. Then and now, he provided her with a sense of safety that was otherwise missing from her life.
Vigil ★★
The Last Mountain ★★★★