I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – when you pull the big knife from a wooden block in the kitchen to defend yourself from nocturnal attackers, the blade doesn’t make a metallic sound. Stop reading this right now and go and find out for yourself if you don’t believe me.
But does anybody hear me when I shout these truths at the television? Of course not. It just carries on regardless.
I love espionage hokum like The Capture (BBC One), precisely because it is so disconnected from reality – from such minutiae as what kitchen knives sound like in combat scenarios to the overarching premise of this grippingly daft second series.
Here, we are to believe that a Chinese tech company in cahoots with Beijing’s autocratic faux-communist politburo is pitching the British government to install facial recognition software at our airports to improve security. And not at all – heavens no! – to facilitate Chinese spies to flit unchallenged past border control officials. Which sounds, geopolitically, nuts. Unless, of course, this is part of a sweetheart trade deal Liz Truss is brokering for pork pies and a handful of beans.
I particularly love to watch actors in TV thrillers perform the eminently risible with straight faces. There’s a great scene at the outset in which DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) is being trained in some form of special ops fisticuffs, the better to administer chop socky to Johnny Foreigner in the field. She not only subdues her burly male foe, but also punches him in the windpipe until even the instructor, though probably enjoying the mindless violence which is why he got into this game in the first place, complains, saying: “That’s not self-defence; that’s manslaughter.” Whatevs, says DI Carey’s expression, as she adjusts her decorously tousled locks and shocked underlings carry the duffed-up colleague away for treatment.
Plot wise, this scene establishes Grainger’s rogue detective as can-do, maverick and deadly as Dirty Harry with the hair-trigger temper of a young Eric Cantona high-fiving a Crystal Palace fan with all the toes of one foot. But I don’t believe for one second in the set-up. That’s not a problem – TV doesn’t have to be plausible for me to enjoy it.
DI Carey, you will remember from series one, was investigating a barrister’s murder. Could it really be the case, as CCTV footage showed, that the lawyer was murdered by hunky Lance Corporal Shaun Emery whom she was defending from the charge of murdering an unarmed member of the Taliban? DI Carey found that the footage showing Emery killing the lawyer had been digitally faked as part of a conspiracy going right to the heart of the state, and perhaps Even Further. And yet, by the end of series one, DI Carey could not stop Emery getting sentenced for six years, leaving her colleagues suspicious that she was part of the conspiracy to frame Emery for Reasons Unclear.
In series two, DI Carey has been promoted to S015, the very security unit suspected of being behind the frame-up. But she is not, as her grizzled former colleague DS Patrick Flynn (the redoubtable Cavan Clerkin) suspects, part of the diabolical conspiracy. Rather it’s so she can get the griff on the deep fake conspiracy run by a bunch of chilly muppets – probably including the superbly glacial Lia Williams as DSU Gemma Garland. But she would say that, wouldn’t she?
DI Carey, then, is a loose cannon from Scriptwriting 101 and if Grainger cracks a smile at any point, it will have to be edited out and replaced by a very earnest look indeed. Even more risible is our other hero, security minister Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu), who has the aura of a more elegant, less consummately sociopathic Dominic Raab, if Raab knew which end was up. Turner is midway through an interview from his home to BBC Breakfast News explaining government policy on Chinese facial recognition scheme only to be photo-bombed by his impossibly sweet six-year-old son in a classic piece of media misdirection. Suddenly the interviewers lose interest in the national cyber security threat and instead focus on establishing exactly how much of cutie pie the pyjama-clad poppet is. It’s a grotesque slur on BBC journalistic standards by – get this – a BBC drama.
Despite the manifold sillinesses, the opening scene in James Kent’s directed episode of Ben Chanan’s drama is done effectively. A Chinese dissident living in a London flat examines the security cameras anxiously. The glass front doors open and close without apparently admitting anybody. The lift doors do the same. Clearly someone is tampering with the camera feed to this doomed plot device. It’s a genuinely chilling sequence, and I hope there’s more of the like to come. After all, the idea that Britain could be subverted by hackers deep faking filmed reality to suit their wild agenda should make for terrifying TV drama.
