When the truth is stranger than fiction, why fictionalise it? This is the problem that bedevils new ITVX drama Litvinenko, which stars David Tennant as the eponymous Russian defector and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, who was fatally poisoned – apparently by agents of the Russian state – in London by polonium-210.
Maybe ITV simply had another chunk left on their contract with David Tennant and thought: “You know what? Shave his head, put him in a hospital bed, squint a bit and he’s a dead ringer for …” Then built a threadbare show around it.
And it is threadbare. A plodding, by-numbers effort that is markedly less enthralling and – perhaps more importantly, given that the murder of an innocent man is the pivotal event – less moving than the real-life unfurling was. His extraordinary poisoning-then-death played out, by Alexander Litvinenko’s own design, on the front pages to bring home the horror of it and Putin’s regime. This four-part drama, which should have made him live again, is a dreary shadow of a thing that largely dispenses with Litvinenko himself by the end of the first episode, then focuses on what cannot have been quite as dull a police procedure as they depict it.
As it is, Litvinenko opens with Alexander (“Sasha” to friends and family) heading home to his wife and children and celebrating the arrival of their naturalisation papers after a long day in town. Shortly after their evening meal he begins vomiting blood. We cut then to a hospital 16 days later and two policemen – DI Brent Hyatt (Neil Maskell) and DS Jim Dawson (Barry Sloane) – in an exposition lift, explaining to each other why they have got the “Edwin Carter” case. “Counter-terrorism don’t want it because it’s a homicide. And homicide don’t want it because nobody’s actually dead. But the real reason nobody wants it is that they all think the man’s lost his marbles.”
I hope that’s clear. Because it really couldn’t be made any clearer.
Still, at least the stage is set for a thrillingly tense battle between sceptical police and the dying man up against the clock! Except that the police scepticism somehow disappears upon mere contact with Litvinenko, and we go straight into statement-taking and more exposition, this time from a hospital bed. He explains that he is not Edwin Carter, but a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service who escaped to London after refusing to kill a listful of supposed enemies of the state. There, he wrote a book about his country’s corruption and made himself a marked man. He knows he was poisoned and he knows who ordered it: “Vladimir Putin.” Dum-dum-daaaah! Except of course not, because we know that, and nothing about the dramatisation of the story so far has added anything to it in human or narrative terms.
And so it goes on. The most surprising thing in the entire opening episode is the size of the urine sample sent to the lab at Aldermaston to try to identify the toxin that is killing Litvinenko. Bloody gallons of the stuff. You would have hoped that the Atomic Weapons Establishment could do more with less – almost as much as you might hope you were watching a drama that didn’t leave you with the time or inclination to ponder such questions. But we are where we are.
The script is woeful. At one point, DI Hyatt says he feels guilty that Sasha’s wife has to wait outside while they interview her dying husband. “The only way to stop yourself feeling like that, Brent,” says his colleague, “is to catch the bastards.” Maybe it would sound better in Russian.
By far the best written and most involving moment is the verbatim reading of Litvinenko’s statement, read posthumously by his friend to the waiting press, professing his thanks to the police and the doctors, his love for his family and making a final strike against Putin. “May God forgive you for what you have done to me and to Russia.”
But art shouldn’t be – by definition, isn’t – a mere transcript. Litvinenko died in 2006. This shouldn’t have been a rush job. There has been the opportunity to work on the story of his life and his death and transmute it – especially in a time when dictatorial regimes, violence and governmental lawlessness are in the ascendant – into something better, broader, more meaningful than this.
