It’s a little bit Bodyguard (Jed Mercurio’s, not Whitney Houston’s) because there’s some terrorist activity on a train. It’s a little bit Idris Elba’s Hijack because the train is – well, hijacked. It’s a little bit 24 because it plays out in real time. And it’s a little bit Speed (for those old enough to remember) because a madman (or several) holds the fates of various passengers in his hands, and only one man and one woman in an unlikely pairing can save them. It is the new six-part drama from the BBC called Nightsleeper. It is set on the Glasgow to London overnight train and it is fantastically dreadful.
Most of it involves members of the cast standing round and staring doomily at a device that has been discovered attached to some wiring in the conductor’s cabin floor. “Is it a bomb?” asks more or less everyone as they come through the door. Personally, were I in a position of authority on the train, I would have firmly locked it behind me each time I entered, so as not to let every passerby in on the news that the train is now being remotely controlled by a person (or persons) who has also jammed everyone’s phones and is probably not in it for shits and giggles. They have cut off communications with the driver, too. I don’t know why the conductor can’t go up the train and bang on the door. But such niggles will soon be subsumed by much larger absurdities.
Our main person on the train is a passenger in a red and black jacket. He is embraced as a hero by his fellow travellers, having foiled a mugging on the platform shortly before getting on. The fact that he won’t tell anyone his name apparently disturbs them not a jot. One passenger, an oil rigger, has a satellite phone which our hero, Joe – Peaky Blinders’ Joe Cole, expressionless to the point of distraction in what is trying very hard to be a high-octane thriller – calls the National Cyber Security Centre and gets talking to acting technical director Abby (Alexandra Roach) about the device attached to the wires in the floor.
Is it a bomb? No. We’ve discussed this. She surmises it could be something to do with the virus she’s heard might be about to attack the antivirus software that some of the country’s critical infrastructure uses. She asks her colleagues to check. It’ll be fine, her curiously complacent colleagues assure her, given that heading off potential threats to critical infrastructure is their one job.
My friends, it is not fine. It turns out that one of the pieces of said infrastructure that depends on the compromised software is … the rail network! The unseen hijackers prove this by restarting the now-driverless train at Motherwell before all the passengers have been emergency disembarked. “We have a hostage situation,” announces Abby, who was about to go on holiday with her best friend when all this kicked off. “A cross-section of society including a disabled woman, a doughty elderly man – who used to drive this train, don’t know if this might come in useful later at all – and his concerned daughter, an annoying reporter, an obstreperous drunk, a missing child, a light-relief funny Scot, a young man, the handy and muscular oil rigger and – uh – the transport secretary, who is in hiding after a social-media scandal, are all on the runaway train.” OK, I’ve added the second bit – but it would be preferable to what she and most of the others do blather on about. The script is woeful.
When the authorities run a facial-recognition check on the passengers, they find that one is wanted by Interpol. You’ll never guess who; if, that is, you have lived your whole life in a dark cellar and never seen television before.
The hijackers – in a curiously bathetic move, though it probably read well on paper – also take over the departures board at Victoria. They would like £10m in bitcoin, please, or else some other form of “Yikes!” will ensue.
As the minutes and hours unfold, matters become increasingly ridiculous and even within the elastic definition we apply to these capers, absurd (armed police teams who don’t check the loos and take a little boy’s word for it that there’s no one else in his hiding place with him, for instance). In addition, the words the poor actors are required to say become increasingly abysmal. At one point, when it appears the train is going to stop at the usual station, the director general of the NCSC says, with complete seriousness: “I didn’t need to take that ibuprofen after all.” Eh?
Watch Hijack again instead. Or Bodyguard. Either version will do.
• Nightsleeper aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
