There ought to be a name for the sub-genre of crime thrillers that use excessive amounts of flashbacks to tease and tease and tease and ultimately irritate the living daylights out of the viewer. “Flashback thrillers”, let’s call this abominable abuse of an old and honoured filmic technique. There is no better symbol of the creative impoverishment of television drama departments than this: cops, and occasionally others, living and mentally suffering through sequences of haunting, repetitive, horrific experiences, like candidates in Tory leadership elections.
Hence The Control Room, which has the added trendy ingredient of being set in Glasgow, looking its darkest here. Gabriel (Iain De Caestecker) is a nice young chap working in an ambulance control room, doing the usual sort of pre-triage work with admirable sensitivity – delivering babies by remote control, coaxing idiot children off roofs, that sort of thing. Then he gets a call from a distressed young woman who seems to have a dying, and then dead, man on her hands. The odd thing is that some way into the call (and overheard by Gabriel’s colleagues), she recognises his voice – “Is that you, Gabo?” The sobriquet suggests that she knows him well, and the interest and suspicion of the control room team is aroused. Another day she rings back, asks to speak to him, and Gabriel pretends to be feeling sick and runs off. The police are informed, they trace the call to a block of flats, and they assume that Gabriel knows more than he’s saying.
