A fine, even rather noble drama: BBC1’s The Salisbury Poisonings reviewed

This week, BBC1 brought us a three-part dramatisation of an ‘unprecedented crisis’ in recent British life. Among other things, it featured a lockdown, an extensive tracking and tracing programme, much heroism from people on the front line, and much confusion among scientists as to how to provide the facts when they didn’t really know them. The Salisbury Poisonings (Sunday–Tuesday) was presumably made well before you-know-what. Yet watching the programme in the current circumstances, it wasn’t easy to decide whether the timing was good or bad luck for the makers. The obvious parallels did lend a haunting, drone-note resonance to proceedings. On the other hand, they sometimes threatened to overshadow what was a fine, even rather noble drama in its own right.

The first episode duly began with Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia being found ill on a Salisbury park bench in 2018 after being poisoned with Novichok. But with that, the programme made the inspired decision to leave the global politics and spy-related stuff behind and to concentrate instead on the local officials who suddenly found themselves at the sharp end of both.

Anne-Marie Duff played Tracy Daszkiewicz, Wiltshire’s director of public health, who was expecting a morning at a food hygiene seminar when she got a call from the police station. Within hours, she’d been given an office there — and the responsibility for ensuring that hundreds of people didn’t die from the Novichok deposits that the Skripals had unwittingly left all over the city. From there, Tracy alternated between worrying that this task was well beyond her and triumphantly proving that it wasn’t.

Equally impressive were the Salisbury police, who gave her their kindly, competent support, despite having a chilling illustration of the dangers involved.