There is always a danger when television executives – who live, predominantly, in four-bedroom London townhouses, picking up oat milk flat whites before electric bicycling their way into Soho – decide to depict the lives of working-class northerners. That jeopardy is on full display in ITV’s five-part true crime thriller, The Walk-In, a look at the rise of the National Action terror group in the wake of the murder of MP Jo Cox. Thankfully, this gritty, disturbing drama manages to squeeze pathos out of one of the most troubling stories in recent British history.
Is there a better actor working in British television, right now, than Stephen Graham? After last year’s one-two punch of Time and Help (not to mention The North Water and Peaky Blinders), Graham returns to screens as Matthew Collins, a far-right activist turned antifascist campaigner and journalist. It is a role that suits Graham down to a tee: he has always had a stocky, pugilistic physique softened by kind, searching eyes. Here, he is totally convincing as a man who was once at the frontline of British racism, but now stalks around an office wearing reading glasses and pastel-coloured Oxford shirts. “We have to believe that people filled with hate can change,” he tells a lecture hall. “I changed.”
