The thing about hardcore police work that is sometimes underestimated by TV drama is that it is unglamorous in the extreme. The offices are crap, everything has to be done by the book, nobody really gets to spend quite enough time with their family, somebody’s dead. It’s a bit like motorway driving: long periods of low-level stress punctuated by sweaty moments of panic.
This almost perversely low-key four parter, written by George Kay (Lupin) and kicking off todayon the new streaming platform ITVX, embraces this unglamorousness. Which is at least appropriate, its subject being not exactly the death, in November 2006, of Alexander Litvinenko – though that is depicted – but the police investigation that followed it, and Litvinenko’s wife Marina’s fight to have her husband’s murder acknowledged as an act of the Russian state.
