If you want to get some healthy perspective on the stresses of your office job, may I direct you to ITV’s Trigger Point? Exec-produced by Jed ‘Line of Duty’ Mercurio and created by debut screenwriter Daniel Brierley, the first episode throws us straight into the adrenalised world of the Met Police’s bomb disposal squad, where the slightest wrong move could have devastating consequences.
Not that you’d know it from the cool demeanour of “expo” (explosives officer) Lana Washington, played by Vicky McClure, who arrives on the scene - a block of flats, the site of a suspected “bomb factory” - wearing Ray-Bans and decompresses after a successful deactivation by bopping along to rap music on her car stereo, in perfect time with the nodding dog that sits on the armrest. Slightly less laidback is her partner Joel Nutkins, played by Adrian Lester. Like Lana, he is ex-military and seems to run on a heady cocktail of sheer exhilaration and off-brand energy drink; after one nerve-shredding near miss he concedes he is “getting too old for this s**t.”
With Mercurio and McClure on board, it’s clear that Trigger Point is ITV’s big play for a ratings behemoth to rival Line of Duty or Bodyguard. Fans of the latter show will spot echoes in everything from the splashes of jargon (LoD fans will surely feel a lurch of smug recognition when Joel suggests it’s time to deliver a sit-rep) to the familiar file of armed police trudging up the poky stairwells of high-rise buildings, but sequences that focus on the painstaking art of bomb disposal are forensic in their approach and genuinely gripping (that most of these scenes have been carved up to land just before each ad break does seem a little bit gratuitous, though - they are strong enough to stand alone without an extra dose of manufactured tension).
When Lana and Joel arrive at the target flat, it’s clear there is no bomb factory, though one explosive device has been stashed under the toilet cistern. Lana is about to turn the bathroom light on to give them a better look - until her partner realises that there is a secondary trigger, which is connected to the very light switch that she has already half-flicked. The scramble to dismantle the device before her hand inevitably slips a millimetre is seriously stress-inducing.
Once they’re out of the bathroom, it’s soon obvious that their job is only half done. An abandoned vehicle poses a new threat to the estate, and when their bomb disposal robot conks out, it is up to Lana to take a more analogue approach. Her search only reveals a host of yet more fraught obstacles - including a kidnap victim stashed in the boot, rigged up with an IED that’s controlled by a series of unregistered burner phones (another one for the LoD bingo card). The police officers on the scene believe the explosives are the work of a terrorist cell, but as of episode one, it’s hard to discern any overarching narrative beyond that just yet.
Indeed, this opener could do with a dash more intrigue - though the stakes certainly shift up a gear in the final act, when Brierley goes the full Mercurio, killing off a major character in one last unexpected blast. It’s not quite Georgia Trotman being lobbed out of a window, but the emotional fallout for Lana and her team will be huge. With a reliably strong lead in McClure, the Mercurio brand name and an original premise, there is all the raw material for a solid hit here, but it might take a little while longer to see whether Trigger Point can come true on its potential.
