Without being at all flippant about Prisoner 951, the dramatisation of the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, abducted and held hostage by the Iranians for six years on spying charges, there is one sequence of grim comedy.
It is 2017 and we see Nazanin (Narges Rashidi), already imprisoned for over a year, in a special jail for female political prisoners, a fairly easy-going situation compared to some of the other more brutal places where she’d been kept in solitary confinement. Suddenly there’s a commotion around the television. “They’re talking about me,” Nazanin notices. She goes over to see Iranian state TV broadcasting a clip of Boris Johnson, the then British foreign secretary, giving evidence to a Commons committee. You may recall his foolish, blundering remarks: “When we look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it, at the very limit.”
