The world was a different place in 2006 when former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko hit global headlines. This was years before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in 2018, and even longer before its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. This was a strange time when Vladimir Putin was still hanging out with George W Bush and Tony Blair; still a tolerated member of the international community. But, as screenwriter George Kay’s new drama on the ITVX streaming service shows, that all began to change with a drop of polonium in a teapot.
The Litvinenko story unravelled extremely quickly. Three weeks after falling ill, Litvinenko was dead – and by that point, his face had been splashed on newspapers around the world. Kay’s series takes the same approach: within the first few seconds, Litvinenko (David Tennant, at first sporting curtains like PJ & Duncan-era Declan Donnelly) is vomiting into a toilet. By the end of the episode, he will be dead. It leaves the rest of the series to deal with the fallout, both the criminal investigation and its diplomatic complications.
