The thing about hardcore police work that is sometimes underestimated by TV drama is that it is unglamorous in the extreme. The offices are crap, everything has to be done by the book, nobody really gets to spend quite enough time with their family, somebody’s dead. It’s a bit like motorway driving: long periods of low-level stress punctuated by sweaty moments of panic.
This almost perversely low-key four parter, written by George Kay (Lupin) and kicking off todayon the new streaming platform ITVX, embraces this unglamorousness. Which is at least appropriate, its subject being not exactly the death, in November 2006, of Alexander Litvinenko – though that is depicted – but the police investigation that followed it, and Litvinenko’s wife Marina’s fight to have her husband’s murder acknowledged as an act of the Russian state.
Much has been made of David Tennant playing the role of the former Russian Federal Security Services officer-turned searing critic of the Russian administration (and of his heavy Russian accent, which to my entirely untrained ears sounded perfectly fine, but what do I know of how they speak in Voronezh?).
Numerous shots of him that mimic the awful photographs we saw in the papers of the dying Litvinenko punctuate the first episode, which starts with him heading home on the bus, Russian music playing through his headphones, having dinner with Marina and their young son, Anatoly, before presenting them ceremoniously with paperwork that has just arrived, confirming the family as British citizens.
Within minutes, he’s throwing up blood, but it takes more than a fortnight of languishing in hospital, arguing with the doctors, before the police reluctantly turn up. He’s sure he’s been poisoned, he knows the president of Russia is behind it, obviously the hospital staff think he’s delusional. The two slightly incredulous police officers dispatched to get his statement, Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt (a sad-eyed Neil Maskell) and Detective Sergeant Jim Dawson (Barry Sloane), have ended up there after internal shenanigans caused by the fact that counter-terrorism think it’s a nonsense, and homicide are reluctant to get involved because nobody has, yet, actually died.
Marina is concerned that nobody is taking the claims made by Sacha (the name she called Litvinenko). Three days of slowly extracting this highly intelligent man’s detailed account of his own murder in a small room at University College Hospital is painful for everyone, including the audience (Tennant’s depiction of his rapid, agonising decline is understatedly horrifying) and by the end of it, it’s not only Hyatt who has become completely invested in the family’s plight.
After episode one though, you won’t see Tennant again. Instead, as the case grinds onwards, each part focuses loosely on a different protagonist, bouncing between Hyatt (desperate, with his wife, to have a child, something that could be put at risk by exposure to radiation – such as that being emitted by a man recently poisoned with it), Detective Superintendent Clive Timmons (Mark Bonnar, dialling down his usual silver fox vibe to excellent effect), who is put in charge of the case, and Marina, played touchingly and with dignity by Russian-American actress Margarita Levieva.
Breakthroughs are small, but significant. Polonium 210, the spectacularly deadly substance that has been found in Sacha’s system, leaves a trace everywhere it goes – what about the plane they flew in on? What about testing the teapots? It’s all astonishingly domestic scale for an international incident. The closest this comes to a Cold War thriller is a trip to Moscow undertaken by Detective Inspector Brian Tarpey (played with slovenly irascibility by Sam Troughton), during which he and his team are constantly watched, possibly mildly poisoned and certainly led a merry dance by the authorities. “If they’d have included mind games in the Olympics, [the Russians] would have swept the board,” notes their perky contact at the British embassy.
The increasingly ludicrous situations they’re ushered into while trying to interview the prime suspects, FSB officers Andrey Lugovoy, played by Rad Kaim, and Dmitri Kovtun (Aleksandr Mikic) are believable in their DIY ridiculousness. When they meet Kovtun, allegedly dying of polonium 210 poisoning at the hands of Litvinenko (the real Kovtun died earlier this year, apparently from Covid-19), he’s swathed in comedy bandages from head to toe, and could literally be anyone. As Dawson quips when they’re told after this farce that they’re to meet Lugovoy next, “Oh? Who’s playin’ him, Al Pacino?” (the dialogue is pleasingly ordinary; the acting restrained. Tarpey pronounces nuclear, ‘nucular’).
The 10 years that the case took to come to anything like fruition is conveyed largely by Marina’s changing hairstyle and Anatoly’s shift from small boy to young man, towering over his mother. The police investigation is shown to be dogged and determined, but hampered by higher-ups, concerned about international relations. Russia’s refusal to extradite Lugovoy and Kovtun creates its own dead end, until the only option is for Marina, and her barrister Ben Emerson (Stephen Campbell Moore), to go it alone.
We all know what happened in what might be called the end. On January 21, 2016, a 328 page report was published, and Theresa May, then Home Secretary, gave a statement to parliament confirming the inquiry’s findings that Litvinenko was “deliberately poisoned by Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun” and that they were very likely acting under the direction of the FSB, with the knowledge of President Putin. As if, by then, any of us thought otherwise.
It’s the details that keep you watching – Sacha’s touching faith in the British police and state (to be fair, the comparison is pretty stark). The description of polonium 210 as “commonly accepted to be the most dangerous substance known to man”. Two police protection officers pouring their tea straight down the sink as soon as Marina, who has been taken with Anatoly to a safe house owned by family friend Boris Berezovsky, leaves the room.
What sticks with you is the perpetrators’ casual disregard for human life. This was, as Kay has said, essentially a chemical attack on a British high street. They left traces of polonium 210 at an Itsu, in a hotel toilet, in a sodding restaurant teapot, to be used again and again and again. A substance that can kill a man if he ingests an amount equivalent to less than a grain of sand.
A doctor, part of the hazmat-suited team (they look like Teletubby dinosaurs) that performs “the most dangerous post-mortem ever undertaken in the western world”, tells Timmons “You’ll need a lead coffin, is the other thing.”
“All organs suffered severe atrophy,” he continues, explaining his findings, “resulting in an almost total state of internal... you know.”
“...No,” says Timmons.
“Well... sludge,” comes the reply.
Jesus. I can’t stop thinking about it.
