Erin Doherty as Becky in Chloe
(Picture: BBC/Mam Tor Productions/Luke Varley)A young woman lies in the dark, her face illuminated by the smartphone held inches from her face. The glow of her LED alarm clock tells us it’s two am - the perfect time to embark on a journey through other people’s digital highlights reels. She keeps returning to one girl’s profile in particular, scrolling back through smiling photos of parties, picnics, drinks and dates.
If you have an Instagram account, the chances are that you’ve been guilty of insomnia scrolling just like Becky, the character played by Erin Doherty (aka The Crown’s formidable Princess Anne) in BBC One’s new drama, Chloe. The sequence, exposing those moments “when it’s just you and your phone and no one’s there to tell you to get off your bloody phone,” as the actress puts it, hits “much closer to home than a lot of people would like to think.” It’s strangely unsettling to be confronted on screen with a behaviour that is surreptitious and self-destructive, but in an everyday way. Engaging with the infinite scroll can, as the show’s creator Alice Seabright puts it, feel “like picking a scab”, and for her character it has become “a way of beating herself up.”
