The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
NO POISONED CHALICE
The Salisbury Poisonings - BBC1
Former investigative journalists Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, who wrote the script of The Salisbury Poisonings, can’t have known that it would be released at a time when most of the world was being subjected to the same fears that the denizens of Salisbury experienced in 2018, when, allegedly, two Russian assassins unleashed a deadly nerve agent on the Wiltshire town.
Lawn and Patterson chose to focus on the impact that the poison had on the innocent folk caught up in the botched attempt to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, rather than on the cloak-and-dagger machinations of the Russian spy network. This was a brave decision, given that the bulk of viewers would have been much happier watching a James Bondski-style thriller.
At the heart of the documentary was the struggle Wiltshire’s director of public health, Tracy Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff ), had to contain the spread of the poison. It wasn’t long before a representative of the government turned up to tell her there was a limit on what she could spend.
When she advocated a complete lockdown of the city’s businesses, the police told her that was going too far. She was abused at public meetings by people whose livelihoods were threatened.
Elsewhere, the unfortunate copper, Detective Inspector Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), who was the first person to investigate the Skripal residence, was himself at death’s door, despite having worn state-of-the-art protective gear.
Spall gave the performance of a lifetime, and Duff wasn’t far behind him, but they had more than their fair share of screen time in which to flex their thespian muscles.
On the other hand, MyAnna Buring, as Dawn Sturgess, the only person to die from novichok, had little opportunity to display her talents. She appeared once or twice at booze-ups or raking through bins with soulmate Charlie before dousing herself with one of the deadliest substances Russia’s chemical warfare boffins could come up with. Charlie had found it in what appeared to be a perfume bottle.
The dead woman’s funeral scene brought home the fact that her loss was a terrible tragedy for her children and parents. The media had, for the most part, portrayed her as a drunken drop-out, and not really worthy of our sympathy.
Indeed, her demise, as a direct result of a foreign power’s decision to commit murder on British soil, seems to have been swept under the diplomatic carpet.
I wonder what the response would have been if she had come from the higher reaches of British society. It may not have made a difference. Jill Dando’s killer has never been brought to justice, despite a mountain of evidence linking the Serbian security service to her death. It seems that international diplomacy trumps justice any day of the week.