The Salisbury Poisonings

I did enjoy learning the story, and the performances were fine. However, when I was done, I had questions about, Tracy, the public health director. She's our main character, but I really had no idea what her job entails. Maybe they could have added, at least a few, examples of Tracy performing some functions of the job. It was a disservice to the real life person portrayed because the only thing they showed was her distraught, stressed and void of confidence. She was overworked, but I never saw her work. She would show up somewhere and just looked wrecked. If her job was to show up and look wrecked at her job, she was excellent. As a bonus, when at home, she looked wrecked there too.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

In March of 2018, in the small town of Salisbury in Wiltshire, two Russian spies unleashed a deadly Novichok nerve agent, plunging the town in to a lockdown. Tracey Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff), the recently appointed local director of Public Health, is thrust in to the spotlight, taking tough decisions in the best interest of her local neighbours and friends, including local DS Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall) who is badly struck down with poisoning, while the situation takes its toll on her home life with her family.

For just under two years now, the whole of the country (and indeed the world) has been forced to adapt to a new way of life, in order to combat the outbreak of a deadly virus, but a couple of years before, in a small town in Wiltshire, a local community was forced to adapt their behaviour to control a situation contained only for them. Even if most of us didn't have to live through it, with the events of the last couple of years, there is at least now a sad air of relatability with this dramatisation of the time by director Saul Dibb.

Initially, in the first episode, Dibb goes for a minimalist, less is more approach, capturing the unfolding events in a docu-drama style fashion, presenting normal, everyday people going about their everyday lives, dealing with their individual problems and dramas, before being thrust in to a major crisis completely out of their control. While this does give it a realistic, outside world feel, it comes at the expense of any real effective character development, leaving us less able to relate and empathise with the characters as we should. He matches the mood and tone of the drama throughout with some appropriate dull, grey lighting, but is less consistent with the character portrayals, which by the second episode have become more screechy and melodramatic.

It's flaws sadly keep it from being the sum of its parts, but it's still elevated by what it gets right, along with some strong, raw lead and supporting performances. ***

It's obvious that the negative comments are coming from certain factions as they're not interested in hearing the human story behind the headlines and only want to debunk the truth. It's not perfect by any means but gives a very good interpretation of the multi agency approach and the difficulties that they had in dealing with this diabolical encroachment on British soil and continue to play their Cold War games not only in the UK but also in Europe. We need to keep telling these stories and expose the threats to our everyday lives by these criminal acts.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this, such a shocking real life event could have been sensationalised or spun, but credit where it's due, this was very well told.

Very well acted, a top notch production all round, we learn Salisbury's story, what happened to the father and daughter on that fateful day in 2018, but also the effects on beautiful Salisbury and its residents.

It could perhaps have been made into two parts, I think the three installments was perhaps a little overlong, Duff and Spall however made up for that.

It's a shocking, sad story, hard to believe possible in this day and age. The negative reviews are unrealistic, this is a good insight into what happened. 8/10.

In the main I enjoyed this drama. My only problem with it is the problem I have with many TV dramas, and that is that it was overly dramatic and at times overacted. Too many scenes of Anne-Marie Duff and her obnoxious son which didn't drive the narrative beyond that she was working hard and wasn't home as much as usual. In fact there were too many scenes of character's home lives and not enough of the police investigation in general. The dialogue was at times unconvincing and unnatural too. I'm sure everyone who worked on the case at the time found it draining at times, but the writer turned up the misery on everyone's faces to 11 and for me that's just lazy and not at all like real life at all. They could have cut out about 1 hour of the over sentimental nonsense and made it a really good watch, but they didn't hence 7 stars from me.