Loose ends

On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of a gruff but kindly detective with a beard. Even so, she needn’t worry too much about getting typecast. In BBC1’s Strike, she continued as the immaculately turned-out, London-dwelling Robin, who uses such traditional sleuthing methods as Google searches. On Channel 4, not only was she dressed in rags, with a spectacular facial scar and a weird hairdo, she was also living in an unnamed dystopian city, where her detective work relied on a handy capacity to read minds.

This was the first and highly promising episode of Electric Dreams, which has set itself the ambitious task of adapting ten sci-fi stories by Philip K. Dick, each with a different writer, director and cast. Sunday’s programme opened with a demonstration understandably protesting against a new law that all citizens must have their minds read by the mutants known as Teeps — as in telepathics. Unfortunately for the protestors, a Teep called Honor (Grainger) was already deploying her psychic powers to identify the ringleader for the cops. And once she had, it didn’t take her long to discover either his most shameful secrets or his co-conspirators. Her reward was to be made the assistant to Agent Ross (Richard Madden) in his quest to root out more anti-government, anti-Teep subversives.

At first, it seemed as if the pair had risen above the mutual suspicion between ‘Normals’ and Teeps — who’ve been banished to their own ghetto. The longer the episode went on, though, the less certain this became.

Dick’s stories, written during the Cold War, are already famous for their ability to resonate in any era. And here — without the programme ever stinting on the thrills — the parallels with our anxieties about state and corporate surveillance, the death of privacy and the fear of minorities (justified or otherwise) came across in a way that managed to feel both unignorable and unforced.