Enough plotlines to power several seasons of The West Wing: BBC1’s Roadkill reviewed

Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a bank of clicking cameras and bellowing journalists. In this case, the politician was Peter Laurence (Hugh Laurie), the Tory minister for transport, who’d just won a libel case against a newspaper that had accused him of using his cabinet position for personal profit. Exactly what he’s supposed to have done, we don’t yet know — although it does seem pretty clear that whatever it was, he did it. Certainly his own lawyer thinks so, as does the journalist who wrote the story but had to retract it in court when she couldn’t fully stand it up.

As it turned out, however, the nature of Laurence’s crime is only one of many things we don’t yet know — because despite Roadkill being a mere four-parter, Sunday’s episode set up enough plotlines to power several seasons of The West Wing. No sooner had Laurence cleared his name, for example, than he discovered that he might have a daughter from his ‘Jack the lad’ years who’s now in a privatised prison where a riot was about to break out. Meanwhile a daughter he is aware of was photographed by the press snorting cocaine in a night club; his closest adviser is feeding information to the prime minister’s closest adviser (when not having sex with her); the journalist and a member of his legal team have started a relationship and maybe formed an alliance against him; and the PM has reneged on a promise to make him foreign secretary, instead joining the long list of people apparently out to get him. (Others I haven’t mentioned include his driver, a fellow inmate of his newly discovered daughter and a waitress called Margaret.) By the end, in fact, so much had semi–happened that the most compelling reason to watch future episodes might well be to see how on earth the programme can sort everything out from here.